In 1776 Charles Lee, a general of the American Continental Army, wrote in a letter that the American colonies’ incorporation into Britain was as remote a possibility as union with the “Afgan Tartars or any of the interior nations of Asia.”^[1] Like the declarations of Dutch Protestants that they would be “better Turk than Papist” in the seventeenth century, the idea of a faraway, Asian, and Muslim people was used to inflate the sense of rupture felt with the past.^[2] But most literature of the period – and indeed of any period – refers to Afghans on the one hand and Tartars on the other, as separate categories. There is a small community of Tatars in today’s Afghanistan, but the modern application of an ‘Afghan’ identity to all citizens of that nation-state does not apply to earlier times. What then is an ‘Afghan Tartar’?

The phrase ‘Afghan Tartar’ crops up in several English-language sources, including histories, a play, and letters, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its use reflects uncertainties and flexibilities over the definition of both the terms ‘Afghan’ and ‘Tartar’ in British understandings of the era. While some may have used it in considered ways, others appear to have picked it up un-discerningly as part of wider usage, mashing together two words for little-known foreign peoples.

‘Tartar’ is a word of enormous variability in its historical application. European authors broadly refer to Inner Asian peoples with the term, from Mongols to Turks to Manchus, often with a frustrating lack of consistency. An association with Central Asia seems to have informed one prominent use of the term ‘Afghan Tartars’: that of Charles Hamilton in his well-known 1787 account of the Rohillas, or Afghans settled in what is now northern India in the 18^th century. Hamilton understands the inhabitants of India to be divided between indigenes and those of outsider heritage, grouped into Persians, Arabs, and Tartars. Thus the Afghans are lumped in with the latter as an intrinsically outsider population.^[3] The idea of rescuing India from foreign tyranny (through a new form of foreign rule) was a popular theme of British imperialism there.

Rohillas are perhaps most often referred to as ‘Afghan Tartars’, including in a parliamentary debate over the prospect of war against them and in various texts. Here, the usage often seems tied to a pejorative judgment about the Rohillas’ status in India, or about profession or lifestyle, without necessarily excluding geography or ethnicity. Major John Scott in a published response to a political speech refers to “Afghan Tartars, or Freebooters, as they undoubtedly were.”^[4] In a House of Commons debate of June 1st and 2nd 1786, a Mr. Hardinge, who disapproved of the war, railed against justifications of an attack on the Rohillas which claimed they were “not a nation,” but “Afghan Tartars, military adventurers, and usurpers upon usurpers.”^[5]

Image: Depiction of Rohilla cavalrymen, by Sita Ram (1814) (Wikimedia commons)

Some instances of the term’s wider use outside of circles closely involved in Indian affairs reflect an even greater absence of clarity. If its application to the Rohillas reflected Hamilton’s view of Indian peoples, or war hawks’ denigrating them as freebooting marauders, the term was by no means confined to those contexts. A couple of texts describe the Afghans who conquered the Persian Safavid Empire in 1722 as ‘Afghan Tartars,’ without any qualification.^[6] We get further still from Afghans themselves in Timour the Tartar (1842), a play by M.G. Lewis centring on the famous conqueror Tamerlane: the titular king is identified as ruling over the ‘Afghan Tartars.’^[7] 

‘Afghan Tartars’ seem to have left the English-speaking imagination after the 19^th century, but similar uncertainties of labelling persist. We might consider the tendency to refer to Afghans as ‘Afghanis’ in English, or the lumping together of Afghanistan or Iran as part of a ‘Middle East’ usually defined by generalised images of Arabic-speaking societies. As with the ‘Afghan Tartars,’ people plug gaps in knowledge about people loosely, by analogy or merging with other categories. 

References

[1] Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1871 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1872), p. 318

[2] See the slogan on e.g. the Rijksmuseum object no. NG-VG-1-407-A.

[3] Charles Hamilton, An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afgans in the Northern Provinces of Hindostan (London: G. Kearsley, 1787), pp. 2, 27

[4] John Scott, A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Speech of the First of December, 1783, on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill (London: J. Debrett, 1784), p. 5

[5] The Debate on the Rohilla War in the House of Commons, on the 1st and 2nd June 1786 (London: John Stockdale), p. 29

[6] E.g. Lenglet du Fresnoy, Chronological Tablets: Exhibiting Every Remarkable Occurrence from the Creation of the World; With Characteristic Traits of Each Event. Chiefly Abridged from the French … (London: Vernor & Hood, 1801), p. 100

[7] M.G. Lewis, Timour the Tartar; a Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts (Baltimore: Joseph Robinson, 1842), ‘Advertisement.’

Timur Khan is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, working on local and regional networks centered on Peshawar between c. 1739 and 1900. His writing can be found on his Academia page.