Lesson Plan: The Great Game

A teaching companion to the Time Rhymes story on the Anglo-Russian Convention of 31 August 1907, the strategic rivalry it ended (the nineteenth-century "Great Game" between Britain and Russia over central Asia), the alliance system it set up (the Triple Entente of 1907-1908 and its outcome in the First World War), and the parallel Trump-Xi summit in Beijing of 14-15 May 2026. Designed for upper-secondary or first-year undergraduate use in courses on imperial history, the origins of the First World War, US-China rivalry, Iran's modern political history, or comparative diplomatic history.

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

1. Reconstruct the chronology and strategic logic of the nineteenth-century "Great Game" between Britain and Russia over Persia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (1810s-1907).

1. Explain the diplomatic, political, and military conditions of 1904-1907 that made the Anglo-Russian Convention possible (the Entente Cordiale, the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and Edward Grey's foreign-secretaryship).

1. Describe the three substantive sections of the 1907 Convention (Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet) and the legal-political consequences for each of the three countries, with particular attention to the Iranian arc from 1907 to the present.

1. Compare the 1907 Convention with the Trump-Xi Beijing summit of 14-15 May 2026 and evaluate whether the structural rhyme (two rival great powers ending their rivalry by carving up the management of third countries) is the right analytical frame for the 2026 moment.

Section 1: The Great Game

The Great Game was the strategic rivalry between the British Empire and the Russian Empire over central Asia and the buffer states between Russian Siberia and British India, from approximately the 1810s to 1907. At its widest the contest covered Persia, Afghanistan, the khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand, Tibet, Xinjiang, the Caucasus, and the approaches to the Indian frontier. The era produced two formal Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839-1842 and 1878-1880), the Crimean War (1853-1856), and constant intelligence rivalry across the Hindu Kush.

Discussion:

• Read Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (1990) on the operational rivalry. How did each empire understand its strategic interest? What was the role of agents and explorers (Burnes, Connolly, Younghusband, Przhevalsky) in shaping policy in London and Saint Petersburg?

• The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) ended in the catastrophic British retreat from Kabul in January 1842 in which only one survivor of a column of approximately 16,000 reached Jalalabad. Read William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (2013) on the lessons that British policy did and did not learn.

• Kipling's Kim (1901) is the most-quoted literary text of the Great Game. Read it alongside contemporary Russian travel writing (Vereshchagin, Tian-Shansky). How differently did each empire imagine the contest?

Section 2: The 1904-1907 thaw

The Anglo-French Entente Cordiale of 8 April 1904 ended several centuries of intermittent Anglo-French rivalry. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, culminating in the Russian naval catastrophe at the Battle of Tsushima (27-28 May 1905), broke the Russian eastward push and immediately triggered the Russian Revolution of 1905. The new Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky, appointed in May 1906, was a Westernising reformer who wanted to reset relations with London. The British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, in office from December 1905, was prepared to talk. King Edward VII offered diplomatic cover for the rapprochement, including a private meeting with Izvolsky at the Marienbad spa in August 1906.

Discussion:

• Read F. R. Bridge's The Habsburg Empire and Foreign Policy and Zara Steiner and Keith Neilson's Britain and the Origins of the First World War (2003) on the diplomatic culture that produced the Convention. What had changed since the 1880s?

• The Russian Revolution of 1905 weakened the Russian state and made Izvolsky more open to compromise. Read Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy (1996) on the constitutional crisis. How did domestic Russian politics shape Russian foreign-policy choices?

• Read selected dispatches of Sir Charles Hardinge (Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and of Sir Arthur Nicolson (ambassador to Saint Petersburg) on the negotiations. What was the British internal debate?

Section 3: The Anglo-Russian Convention of 31 August 1907

The convention was signed in Saint Petersburg on 31 August 1907 by the British ambassador Sir Arthur Nicolson and the Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky. It had three substantive sections.

Persia was divided into three zones: a Russian sphere of influence in the north (including Isfahan, Tabriz, and Tehran), a British sphere in the south-east (Kerman, Sistan, and Baluchistan), and a neutral zone in the middle. The Persian parliament, the Majlis, then in the second year of its Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), was not informed before the convention was signed.

Afghanistan was placed in the British sphere of influence. Russia recognised that London had the dominant interest in Kabul. Britain in turn promised not to annex Afghan territory and agreed that Russia could communicate with Afghan officials on commercial matters. The Afghan emir, Habibullah Khan, was not consulted.

Tibet was acknowledged to be under "Chinese suzerainty." Both empires promised to refrain from direct dealings with Lhasa. The thirteenth Dalai Lama, then in exile in Mongolia (at Urga, now Ulaanbaatar), was not consulted. China was not consulted either, but Beijing was pleased.

Discussion:

• Read the text of the Convention (the Foreign Relations of the United States archive has an English translation). How precisely is each sphere defined? What is the legal status of the "neutral zone"?

• The Iranian Constitutional Revolution had begun the previous year. Read Ali Ansari's Iran: A Modern History (2019) on Iranian reactions to the Convention. How did the Majlis respond? What did it mean for the Constitutional movement that its country had been divided behind its back?

• Tibet was placed under "Chinese suzerainty" by foreign agreement. Read Melvyn Goldstein's A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 (1989) on the consequences. How did the Tibetan government understand its position after the Convention?

Section 4: The Iranian arc, 1907-2026

The Convention's neutral middle zone in Persia became, in 1908, the location of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company concession at Masjed Soleyman, where oil was first struck on 26 May 1908. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later, after 1935, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, AIOC) became the dominant Western economic interest in Iran for the next 45 years. In 1951 Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the AIOC. In August 1953 the CIA's TPAJAX Project and the British Secret Intelligence Service's Operation Boot jointly overthrew his government. The CIA-installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ruled until 1979, when the Islamic Revolution overthrew his dynasty. The post-revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran fought the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), survived through the 1990s and 2000s, signed and lost the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and is, in May 2026, in the tenth week of war with the United States.

Discussion:

• The argument that "Iran's twentieth century begins in Saint Petersburg in 1907" is sometimes made by Iranian historians and rejected by others as deterministic. Read Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003) and Abbas Amanat's Iran: A Modern History (2017) on the chain of events. How tight is the causal chain?

• The Anglo-Persian Oil Company concession of 1908 was negotiated under the William Knox D'Arcy concession of 1901, which long predated the Convention. Read R. W. Ferrier's The History of the British Petroleum Company (1982) and Daniel Yergin's The Prize (1991) on the oil concession's relationship to the Convention. How important was the Convention itself to the AIOC's growth?

• Counterfactual: if Britain and Russia had not signed the Convention in 1907, would Iran have escaped the twentieth-century pattern of foreign control? What is the strongest counter-argument?

Section 5: The path to 1914

The fourth, unwritten feature of the Anglo-Russian Convention was that by ending Anglo-Russian rivalry over the buffer states, both empires were freed to focus on a fourth party. That fourth party was the German Empire. Across 1907-1908 the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia took shape. The Anglo-French Entente of 1904 plus the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 plus the existing Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 created the alliance system that fought the First World War. Seven years and three days after the Saint Petersburg signature, on 3 August 1914, Britain and Russia were at war with Germany together.

Discussion:

• Read Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012) on the Anglo-Russian relationship in the years between the Convention and the outbreak of war. How load-bearing was the Convention?

• The Convention removed the buffer-state friction that had previously kept Anglo-Russian tensions high. Did this make European war more likely or less likely? Was the Convention a peace treaty or a war preparation?

• The German general staff's response to the Triple Entente was the Schlieffen Plan (drafted 1905-1906, finalised 1906-1914). Read Annika Mombauer's Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (2001) on German military planning. To what extent did the Convention precipitate the militarisation of Berlin?

Section 6: The 2026 summit

President Donald Trump's two-day state visit to Beijing for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled for 14-15 May 2026, the first US state visit to China since November 2017. The published agenda runs to thirty-seven items, including trade, rare-earth supply chains for semiconductor manufacture, advanced-chip export controls, Taiwan, the Strait of Hormuz, the Iran war, and bilateral artificial intelligence regulation. American negotiating priorities include rare-earth supply guarantees, Chinese pressure on Iran (China buys 90 percent of Iranian oil exports), softening of Chinese pressure on Taiwan, and a bilateral AI framework. Chinese priorities are mirror images: a rollback of US restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports, restraint on US arms sales to Taiwan, political guarantees against Taiwanese formal independence, and a bilateral trade architecture for the global market for rare earths, agriculture, aerospace, and energy.

Discussion:

• Map the structural similarities between the 1907 Convention and the 2026 summit. Both involve two rival great powers ending (or pausing) a period of strategic rivalry. Both involve multi-track agreements that decide the fate of third countries (Iran, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, the Gulf states, the African rare-earth producers, the Pacific islands) without those countries being in the room.

• Map the disanalogies. The 1907 Convention was a formal treaty negotiated over a year and signed in a single document; the 2026 summit is a two-day political meeting. The 1907 Convention's third parties were small or weak; some of the 2026 third parties (Taiwan, the EU, India) are large and economically significant. The 1907 fourth party (Germany) was a single rising great power; the 2026 fourth party (if any) is less clearly identified.

• Read selected analyses of the Trump-Xi summit: the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy, the Carnegie Endowment, Bloomberg, the South China Morning Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Asia Times. Which analytical frame (Yalta, Reykjavik, Nixon-Mao, the 1907 Convention, something else) best fits the 2026 moment?

Section 7: The closing question

The Time Rhymes story closes: "Britain and Russia in 1907 thought they were ending a rivalry. They were also setting up a new alliance against a third great power they could see was rising. ... In 1907 the third party was named Germany and the convention took seven years to mature into war. The 2026 convention is being signed in May. There is no requirement that it take seven years. ... The Great Game ended in 1907. The new Great Game just began."

Discussion (closing):

• Identify the rising third great power that the 2026 Trump-Xi summit (if it succeeds in pausing US-China rivalry) might be implicitly aligning against. Is it India? Is it Russia (less likely)? Is it artificial intelligence as a non-state actor? Is it themselves, in a different timeline?

• The 1907 Convention is sometimes blamed for the First World War and sometimes credited for the British Empire's late-stage survival. Which is the better reading?

• If you had to write the analogous closing question for a future Time Rhymes story written in 2126, what would it say?

Suggested further reading

The Great Game and the 1907 Convention:

• Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (1990)

• William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (2013)

• Beryl J. Williams, The Strategic Background to the Anglo-Russian Entente of August 1907 (Historical Journal, 1966)

• Zara Steiner and Keith Neilson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (2003)

• Foreign Relations of the United States, 1907 Part 1, on the Convention

The origins of the First World War:

• Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012)

• Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace (2013)

• Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (2001)

Iran from 1907 to the present:

• Ali Ansari, Iran: A Modern History (2019)

• Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)

• Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003)

• Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1991)

The 2026 Trump-Xi summit:

• Use the evidence manifest from the Time Rhymes story for primary news sources on the May 14-15 2026 summit and its multi-track agenda.

• Council on Foreign Relations, "At the Trump-Xi Summit, China Will Have the Upper Hand" (May 2026)

• Foreign Policy, "Trump-Xi Summit: What to Expect on Trade, Taiwan, and Iran War" (12 May 2026)

• Bloomberg, "Trump-Xi Summit Is About More Than Trade, Taiwan, Chips" (10 May 2026)