Empire is pivotal to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ stories. India, South Africa, the Andaman Islands, Sierra Leone and of course Australia and New Zealand form a substantial part of his imaginary landscape. This is true, right from the beginning. In A Study in Scarlet, we are introduced to Dr Watson who took his degree of Doctor of Medicine from University of London in 1878. He joined the Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon and was stationed with his regiment in India as the second Afghan war broke out. He arrived In Bombay and then Candahar (sic). He served in Maiwand and was invalided out after being struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet. He was removed by packhorse to safety and landed in Peshawar where he was further struck down by dysentery.
This is the opening segment of the Holmes oeuvre. We are thrust, straight off, into Imperial India, colonial war, and place names that speak to the extent of empire, but not necessarily its grandeur. The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) was a conflict between the British Empire and the Emirate of Afghanistan, driven by imperial rivalry—particularly the British desire to counter Russian influence in Central Asia during the era known as the “Great Game.”
The war began after the British demanded that Afghanistan accept a British diplomatic mission, a move designed to match Russian advances in the region. Emir Sher Ali Khan, suspicious of British motives and already entertaining a Russian envoy, refused. In response, the British launched a military invasion in November 1878 from British India, with three separate columns advancing into Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass, Kurram Valley, and Bolān Pass.
Sher Ali fled north and died shortly afterward, leaving the throne to his son, Yakub Khan, who negotiated peace. The Treaty of Gandamak (May 1879) forced Afghanistan to accept a British Resident in Kabul, cede control of its foreign policy to Britain, and allow British control of key frontier areas. However, the peace was short-lived. In September 1879, a popular uprising in Kabul led to the massacre of the British Resident, Sir Louis Cavagnari, and his staff. This provoked a second British military campaign, during which Kabul was occupied and Yakub Khan was deposed.
The British sought to install a more compliant ruler and eventually chose Abdur Rahman Khan, a cousin of Sher Ali, who was seen as politically shrewd and militarily capable. Although fighting continued intermittently, including a significant Afghan victory at the Battle of Maiwand in July 1880 under Ayub Khan, Yakub’s brother, the war was winding down. British forces won a decisive battle at Kandahar in August 1880, defeating Ayub Khan and consolidating their influence.
By 1881, the British had withdrawn most of their troops, and Abdur Rahman Khan was recognized as Emir, with firm control over domestic affairs but no authority in foreign relations, which remained under British supervision. The British retained control over Afghanistan’s frontier and kept a close watch on the Durand Line region.
The war revealed the difficulties of controlling Afghanistan militarily, as terrain, tribal divisions, and fierce resistance made occupation costly and precarious. Though the British did not colonize Afghanistan, the war effectively transformed it into a buffer state, nominally independent but strategically aligned with British interests to block Russian expansion toward India.
In the long term, the Second Afghan War shaped both Afghan political dynamics and British imperial policy. It contributed to the establishment of a centralized Afghan state under Abdur Rahman, known for his authoritarian rule and administrative reforms. For Britain, the war underscored the importance of controlling frontier regions and led to further fortification and surveillance of the North-West Frontier Province.
Ultimately, the Second Afghan War was a brutal but formative episode in 19th-century imperial rivalry. It secured British strategic aims temporarily but also confirmed the limits of imperial power in Afghanistan, a lesson that would resonate in future interventions. Conan Doyle used the historical fact of British defeat at Maiwand to explain Watson’s injury during the war and to make plausible his return to England, his health ‘irretrievably ruined’. This is colonial history in the service of fiction.
In The Sign of Four, India is central to the story. Two of the story’s protagonists, Major Sholto and Captain Morstan served in India, commanding troops at the Andaman Islands. The key document, termed The Diagram is signed by Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, and Dost Akbar. Only Jonathan Small of the four was English, the others were readily identifiable as of Asian origin. The home of the retired Major John Sholto was Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood, named after Pondicherry, a city on the southeastern coast of India, on the Bay of Bengal, another nod to Imperial India. The key to the mystery of The Sign of Four dated to an uprising in India, a mutiny of Indian soldiers at Delhi and Agra.
The Indian Mutiny is also known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the First War of Indian Independence, or the Sepoy Mutiny. It was a widespread uprising against the British East India Company’s rule. In the northern cities of Delhi and Agra, the rebellion took on particularly intense and symbolic significance, combining military insurrection, local grievances, and a deeper resistance to colonial domination.
The immediate trigger of the rebellion was the introduction of a new Enfield rifle, which required soldiers (sepoys) to bite off cartridges greased with cow and pig fat, an offensive requirement to both Hindus and Muslims. But there were deeper causes including resentment of British political domination, dispossession of local leaders, heavy taxation, erosion of traditional society and growing fears of religious interference.
Conan Doyle’s story did not examine the causes of the uprising nor did it indicate his political views about what was going on in India. Nonetheless, historically, the mutiny in Delhi and unrest in Agra were central to the British decision to dissolve the East India Company and transfer rule directly to the British Crown in 1858. Delhi’s fall marked both the symbolic collapse of Indian sovereignty under the Mughals and the beginning of a more direct and centralized British Raj.
In the story, ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, the said Blue Carbuncle was found on the banks of the Amoy River in Southern China. It is important to say that there was significant British presence in the environs of the Amoy River (modern Xiamen, in Fujian province) during the 19th century, particularly following the First Opium War (1839–1842) and the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. After the British victory in the First Opium War, the Treaty of Nanking forced China to open five treaty ports to foreign trade and residence. These included Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. From 1842 onwards Amoy had resident British merchants, missionaries, and consular officials. They were allowed to reside, trade, and build property in designated areas around the city. The British presence at Amoy was part of a broader imperial expansion into coastal China by Western powers in the 19th century. Britain, in particular, sought commercial access to Chinese markets, diplomatic privileges and the spread of Christianity. Amoy was viewed as a gateway into China’s interior.
In ‘The Speckled Band’, the main character has an Indian connection. Dr Roylott studied medicine in England and then went out to Calcutta to practise medicine and this was where he made his money before returning to England. In the 19th century, Calcutta (now Kolkata) was the capital of British India until 1911. It was a major hub of British colonial administration, commerce, and culture, and this extended significantly into medicine. The presence and activity of British doctors in Calcutta during this period was substantial. It was shaped by both imperial needs and the evolving colonial medical infrastructure. British doctors played a dominant role in shaping medical practice, education, and public health in Calcutta. Their influence extended through hospitals, the Indian Medical Service, Calcutta Medical College, and colonial health administration. While their practices were often embedded in a project of imperial control and medical hierarchy, they also laid the foundation for institutionalized Western medicine in India.
Conan Doyle, of course, does not give an account of the facts of the medical project in Imperial India in his story, but to his contemporary readers, these facts about the role of British doctors specifically, in Calcutta and generally, in Imperial India would have been well known. It is the modern reader whose familiarity with the details of the Imperial project is poor, and as such, whose reading is limited to the story rather than to the richness of the unstated context.
In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Charles Baskerville had made his money in South African speculations before returning to live at Baskerville Hall. In the 19th century, British interests in South Africa evolved from strategic and colonial concerns into intense economic speculation, particularly in natural resources. Over the course of the century, British individuals and companies speculated heavily in diamonds (from 1867 onwards). The discovery of diamonds near Kimberley in the Northern Cape in 1867 triggered a diamond rush. British adventurers, prospectors, and financiers flooded the region, transforming it into one of the world’s most important diamond-producing areas. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand near Johannesburg in 1886 sparked another, even more significant, speculative frenzy. Before diamonds and gold, British speculation in South Africa in the early 19th century focused on land acquisition, and settler farming.
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holme’s stories, unsurprisingly, employed motifs and facts from the imperial world as context for his plots as for his dialogue. Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? put it like this
[P]eople of the same period and community, who have lived through the same events, who had raised or avoided the same questions, have the same taste in their mouths; they have the same complicity, and there are the same corpses among them. That is why it is not necessary to write so much; there are key words’
So, it is with Conan Doyle, he did not need more than a few key words to signal the entirety of the attitude of his day towards the imperial project, its disasters, as well as its images. The risk is that in our day much of this context will be lost.
Photos by Jan Oyebode
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