Central Asia / contributor G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co.

“Description Relief shown by hachures. "Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1885 by G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co. in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington." Include inset showing the area in the bigger context of Africa, Europe and Asia. Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as a raster image. LC copy mounted on linen”.

“Central Asia: Afghanistan and Her Relation to British and Russian Territories : This 1885 map shows Asia from the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean to western China and the Indian subcontinent. An inset in the upper right depicts the region in the broader context of Asia, Europe, and Africa. A focal point of the map is Afghanistan, where, in what was called “the Great Game,” the Russian and British empires competed for influence throughout most of the 19th century. The British feared that the Russians, who annexed large parts of Central Asia in the 1860s and 1870s, would use Afghanistan as a base from which to threaten British India. The central region of Arabia is described as “uninterrupted desert from Mecca to Oman.” The map has two distance scales, one in English statute miles and another in Russian versts. Intended for American audiences, it also shows, at the bottom center, the U.S. states of Indiana and Ohio, which are drawn to scale as a way of comparing distances in the region with those in the United States. The map was issued by the G.W. & C.B. Colton Company, which was owned by George Woolworth Colton (1827–1901) and Charles B. Colton (1832–1916), the sons of Joseph Hutchins Colton (1800–93), founder of the pioneering map publishing firm J.H. Colton & Company”—copied from website.

The Library of Congress donated copies of the digitized material (along with extensive bibliographic records) containing more than 163,000 pages of documents to ACKU, the collections that include thousands of historical, cultural, and scholarly materials dating from the early 1300s to the 1990s includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers and periodicals related to Afghanistan in Pushto, Dari, as well as in English, French, German, Russian and other European languages ACKU has a PDF copy of the item.

English