What is Canada’s place in the new Great Game, over the control of critical minerals and rare earths?

Published in the Globe and Mail

By Robert Muggah

It all began with a bureaucratic assignment on Jan. 12, 1830.

Lord Ellenborough – then the president of the Board of Control, the top British official charged with managing colonial Indian affairs in London – instructed India’s governor-general, Lord William Bentinck, to pursue a new trade route to Bukhara, a major hub of Central Asian trade. That directive sparked a fierce competition between Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia, both of which sought to control South Asia and Africa, giving rise to decades of diplomatic and occasionally military conflict.

The rivalry was immortalized by British writer Rudyard Kipling as the Great Game, and it went on to shape geopolitics for much of the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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