Henry Creswicke Rawlinson

Oxfordshire, Bombay and Persia

Rawlinson was born at Chadlington, Oxfordshire, on 11 April 1810. At seventeen he sailed for India as a cadet of the East India Company and landed at Bombay on 27 October 1827. He learned Persian well enough to be chosen in 1833 for the small body of Indian Army officers sent to reorganise the Shah's troops.

In Persia he commanded bodies of Persian troops, carried civil duties in the province of Kermanshah and began copying the rock inscriptions of Hamadan and Behistun. The great inscription of Darius, cut high on a cliff face, became the work of his life.

Kandahar, Baghdad, Tehran and the India Council

When relations with Persia were broken off over Herat he returned to India, and in the Afghan War of 1839–1842 he served as Political Agent at Kandahar beside General Nott. He then declined more lucrative offices and asked for the political agency at Baghdad, where he worked from 1844 to 1849 and again from 1851 to 1855 on the cuneiform records and the excavations of Assyria.

Back in England he was created a civil K.C.B. in 1856, became a director of the East India Company, entered Parliament for Reigate and sat on the first Council of India in 1858. In 1859 and 1860 he served as Envoy and Minister at Tehran, resigning when control of the mission passed from the India Office to the Foreign Office. He sat for Frome from 1865, returned to the Council of India for life in 1868 and was elected President of the Royal Geographical Society in 1871. He was created a baronet in 1891 and died in London on 5 March 1895.

The literary work

England and Russia in the East (1875) gathers papers from the Calcutta Review and the Quarterly Review with chapters prepared for the volume. Rawlinson describes the Russian advance from the Caspian towards the Oxus, the position of Persia and Afghanistan, and the measures he thought necessary for the defence of India, including the possible occupation of Herat and Kandahar and a share of the cost for the Imperial Treasury. The folding map of Central Asia, coloured under his own responsibility, belongs to the argument.

The legacy

Rawlinson insisted that an empire could lose the security of its frontiers long before an enemy crossed them, and he brought the knowledge of the frontier into the councils where its fate was decided.