Josiah the Great

Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker, travels to India in the 1820s and enters the military and political world of the East India Company, the Sikh Empire and Afghanistan. Through medical knowledge, self-invention and repeated changes of allegiance, he becomes an adviser and commander to Asian rulers while pursuing the ambition of acquiring a principality of his own.

Macintyre reconstructs Harlan’s journeys from unpublished writings and the records of the early Great Game, examining the mixture of curiosity, opportunism and imperial confidence behind his career. The book was also published as The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan.