America expanded trade and cultural relations as it faced foreign competition from the entrenched powers in Iran, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company maintained its strong economic control over Iran. Despite these limitations, the Pahlavi state centralized and engaged in nation-building. However, it imposed political restrictions and censorship that privately concerned American diplomats. Iran embarked on an immense project to build a national railway system, which it inaugurated just before another global war. The repression of political dissent, particularly religious or socialist viewpoints, raised concerns about Reza Shah’s style of leadership. Some Iranian intellectuals gravitated toward intolerant ideologies that clashed with the country’s legacy of religious and ethnic accommodation.

Chapter 4 traces how the German firms, big business and bazaar exporters alike, reentered India after World War I. It shows how the postwar situation triggered a joint sense of victimhood among Germans and Indians who both felt mistreated and exploited by the British, laying the groundwork for a mental map of nationalism that highlighted their parallel history. Both Germans and Indians experimented with new sensemaking offers, among them the bold idea of an Indo-German “Aryan” community that claimed a joint heritage of both people. However, this “identity work” required constant effort and investment. And, many of the Indian suggestions seemed too audacious for most German businesspeople to approve. While they often advocated political neutrality towards the goals of the Indian Independence movement and other independence movements around the world, they also took notice of the similar national aspirations of countries, which otherwise had little in common and started discussing them as a cluster.

The final phase of Russian expansion in Central Asia occurred in some of the most remote and inhospitable territory on the planet – the high Pamir plateau and the valleys of Shughnan, Roshan and Wakhan, inhabited by sparse populations of Kyrgyz and Pamiri Tajiks. The latter were considered by the Russians to be the last remnants of the autochthonous ‘Aryan’ population of Central Asia, and became an object of ethnographic fascination for this and their Isma’ili religion. Faced with the threat of domination by Sunni Muslim lowlanders – whether in Afghanistan or Bukhara – for many Pamiris Russian rule was a more attractive option. This was perhaps the one phase of the conquest where the old Soviet trope of ‘voluntary uniting’ contains a grain of truth – the Pamiris actively lobbied for a Russian presence on their territory, and proved adept at manipulating it to their advantage. The Pamirs were also the site of some of the most mythologised episodes of the ‘Great Game’, but, while the British were concerned by Russian activities, in 1895 they came to an amicable agreement on the drawing of a new frontier along the river Panj. The problems with Bukharan rule over Shughnan, Roshan and Wakhan proved much more intractable, and led to the imposition of direct Russian rule in 1905.