Connecting Histories in Afghanistan
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Connecting Histories in Afghanistan

Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

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Connecting Histories in Afghanistan

Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

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About This Book

Most histories of nineteenth-century Afghanistan argue that the country remained immune to the colonialism emanating from British India because, militarily, Afghan defenders were successful in keeping out British imperial invaders. However, despite these military victories, colonial influences still made their way into Afghanistan. Looking closely at commerce in and between Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar, this book reveals how local Afghan nomads and Indian bankers responded to state policies on trade. British colonial political emphasis on Kabul had significant commercial consequences both for the city itself and for the cities it displaced to become the capital of the emerging Afghan state. Focused on routing between three key markets, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan challenges the overtly political tone and Orientalist bias that characterize classic colonialism and much contemporary discussion of Afghanistan.

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PART I
Colonial Market Knowledge and Commercial Experimentation
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Introduction: The Historical Location and Conceptual Framing of Afghanistan
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Old Market Time and New State Space from the Silk Road to the Indian Ocean
The emergence of new states tends to transform old market relations. Modern states are fundamentally territorial entities, while markets are essentially time-bound to various daily, seasonal, and political calendars. But markets and states also overlap and share temporal and spatial interests in such things as cities. This generality is all to say that there is a range of possible relationships between markets and states in time and space that oscillate between complementary and oppositional polarities.
In the case of Afghanistan, we are dealing with very old markets and a very new state, and the Afghan state has not fared well in terms of market integration. The state structure that took shape in and around Qandahar under the direction of Ahmad Shah Abdali/Durrani in the mid-eighteenth century had deep roots in both Iran and India. Ahmad Shah was born in the Mughal district of Multan on the Indus river plain, but he gained political recognition to the west in the service of the Turco-Iranian ruler Nadir Shah Afshar. Ahmad Shah’s use of Qandahar as the first capital of the Durrani Afghan state reflects the city’s long-term function as transit market for the brisk overland trade between Mughal India and Safavid Iran that had deeper historic origins in exchanges between Mesopotamian and Indus valley civilizations.1 These overland routes exposing two ancient worlds to one another were complemented by a series of aquatic linkages that integrated port city and hinterland markets across the Indian Ocean world encompassing South and Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and East Africa.2 Qandahar can be seen as positioned amid a set of commercial routes and networks with a generally southerly orientation.
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MAP 1.1. Interregional Satellite Map, 2008
Ahmad Shah’s son and successor Timur Shah transferred the Afghan capital from Qandahar to Kabul in 1775–76, and in 1809 Mountstuart Elphinstone made the first official colonial contact with Timur’s son Shah Shuja at Peshawar, the Durrani winter capital city at that time.3 Kabul and Peshawar fall within a set of ancient commercial routes known collectively as the Silk Road.4 The Silk Road represents a more northerly commercial axis connecting the Chinese and Mediterranean worlds. Civilizations and emporia, and the routes within and between them, rose and fell across the Silk Road during its long history. These historic ebbs and flows occurred according to different rhythms in the north than among the port cities and empires associated with them to the south across the Indian Ocean. Kabul generally enters Silk Road discussions in the context of the Greco-Bactrian period lasting between roughly the sixth century BCE and the first century CE that was centered in Balkh but had a distinct presence in locations such as Begram in the Kabul valley. Peshawar is generally viewed as the center of the Silk Road culture area known as Gandhara. Gandhara has been variously and often quite liberally dated, but the culture seems to have flourished during roughly the first few centuries AD when Buddhism was patronized by a number of rulers and dynasties including the Kushan Emperor Kanishka in the second century. It is important to recognize the wide assortment of cultural exchange between Bactria and Gandhara spawned an array of smaller movements and developments in Afghanistan, and beyond. For example, Hadda near contemporary Jalalabad and Bamian in central Afghanistan were once thriving centers of Buddhist learning and innovation, sites of interreligious pilgrimages, and locations of cultural achievement.
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MAP 1. 2. Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar Satellite View, 2008
The colonial construction of Afghanistan involved some very aged market settings, and Timur Shah, not the British, transformed Kabul into a capital city of the Durrani polity. However, the colonial emphasis on Kabul as the sole political capital of an emerging Afghanistan had important consequences for Kabul as a commercial center and also for the city’s market relations with Qandahar and Peshawar. Kabul’s “rise” as a political capital entailed a reconfiguration of the city’s role in domestic and transnational commercial circuits and networks. The body of this book considers transformations in a triangulated economic relationship between Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar that crossed two distinct political spaces to form an interactive consortium of colonial frontier markets.
Markets and Their Transformation: Mobility, Money, Machines, and Texts
Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar are ancient market settings between one and two thousand years of age. In a long-term historical perspective, Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar have combined in varying proportions exchange, finance, storage, and consumption activities. Despite these broad structural similarities, each market has been distinguished by special functions through historical eras. Over the long term, these three markets have interacted dynamically and together with the smaller markets between them and in their respective orbits this commercial zone has served to connect wider supra-regional economic networks in Central and South Asia.
In conceptual terms, markets are centers of production, consumption, exchange, and circulation where goods and services become commodities through coexistence and interaction that is either directly or ultimately mediated by standards of value measured in currency, either cash money as reflected in retail market prices or book monies of account as used in the fiscal registers of states and large merchant firms. The commodification process occurs through exchange and the medium of currency, and markets are places where cash money and other forms of moveable and fixed commercial capital accrue and are transformed. The exchange functions of markets attract the interest of commercial actors in other markets as well as political authorities, and Islamic states typically involve the institution of muhtasib, or (chief) market inspector. The activities and prosperity of any market or state is contingent on interaction with other markets and states. Markets are locations where movements of people and things intersect and where relationships between people and things are reproduced and transformed. In market settings, social groups can be identified through the commodities they engage and control. Market settings can be examined, therefore, with attention to the commodities being exchanged and the financial instruments involved in the transaction, the communities represented in the transaction, and the political context of the exchange. Market exchanges can be interrogated, then, with a few basic questions in mind. What was and who were involved in the exchange? How did the transaction happen in technical fiscal terms? What was the role of the state or other regulatory agency within the marketing activity, if any?
This book poses those basic questions to nineteenth-century Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar. Concerning commodity groups and trajectories of movement, the export trade in dried and fresh fruits and nuts from the Kabul and Qandahar districts to India was perhaps the most prominent and lucrative component of the economies of all three localities. Indian merchants financed this high-volume export of Afghan fruits and nuts, and Peshawar was an important base for the large numbers of bankers and financiers active in this trade. Peshawar’s “natural” displacement as a staging area for wider distribution of fruits and nuts to South Asian markets where they were in high demand was dramatically transformed during the course of the nineteenth century as a result of political and economic developments associated with the the two Anglo-Afghan wars. Similar questions about other commodities generally moving to the south, such as timber, hemp, felt, horses, sheep and its derivate wool and woolens, hides, and meat, and opium will generate different answers about the role of state authorities and local actors. Flows of tea, sugar, textiles, industrial equipment, and its technical expertise in the opposite northern direction occurred across the same routes but had different commercial and political motivations, possibilities, and constraints for the actors. These commodity “counterflows” completed the commercial circuit and they entailed separate consequences for actors connected to the respective commodities or commodity groupings in each market on the return trajectory.5 The body of this work seeks to answer a small set of basic questions about the material, social, and political dimensions of market exchanges and commodity movements in and between Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar during the 1800s.
In the course of striving for that basic goal, a number of other fundamental issues informing the political economy of this frontier zone will be considered. Labor processes are addressed from the perspectives of sedentary production and mobile circulation and redistribution. Fruit and nut production involved relatively sedentary laborers and very mobile accountants and transporters. The producers themselves are viewed primarily through the products of their labor and the bankers and bureaucrats who financed, marketed, and taxed those commodities. The state-appointed accountants and scribes acted in conjunction with similar functionaries in the private sector/civil society to textually manage the fruit and nut trade. These state and private bookkeepers are treated as a laboring bureaucratic class in their own right. Bankers and financiers form another group of laborers. In the layers and interstices of the economy where money handlers and bookkeepers were jointly active, communities of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims of Indian origin collectively referred to as Hindkis were quite prominent. The Qizilbash community is the most prominent among the local Afghan actors involved in the textual and scriptural dimensions of state and private commercial activities. Wielding the power of literacy in these contexts helps distinguish the shia Qizilbash from the shia Hazara in Afghanistan, although one clear exception to that general rule is the high profile of Faiz Muhammad Katib, a Hazara scribe who authored the most important historical text produced in Afghanistan, the Seraj al-Tawarikh.6
Transportation is another form of labor receiving attention in this work. In various portions of what follows, individual tribal chiefs and through them nomadic communities who were contracted to transport popular consumer goods and war material are discussed. Colonial commercial contracts with two Afghan tribal entrepreneurs are treated in detail. Sayyid Muhin Shah, who adopted nomadic trade after difficulties in the sedentary world, is responsible for initially quantifying the profitability of trade through Kabul, Peshawar, Qandahar, and other markets for British colonial authorities. Sarwar Khan Lohani was the most important local figure in the overall organization of camel caravans for the first British occupation force. Carriage service was big business and a state concern. A long-established class of nomadic “tribal traders” was caught in a textual net comprised of passes, vouchers, and certificates associated with Abd al-Rahman’s state monopolization of the fruit trade. These state texts and the new cadres of officials handling them were deployed to reroute the nomadic tribal carriers in a way that greatly intensified commercial traffic between Kabul and Peshawar at the expense of routes between other markets that were concomitantly deemed to be passages for smugglers.
The diverse communities of Indian merchants subsumed under the Hindki label (see later in this chapter and Chapter 1) did not act alone in Afghanistan. Rather, they performed local roles for a number of extensive banking and commercial networks associated with resources concentrated in Hindustan and representatives spanning the old Silk Road and Indian Ocean circuits.7 The high profile of Indian merchants in Afghanistan arose from their knowledge of and presence in the foreign markets where Afghan edibles were widely consumed. Furthermore, through global commercial networks, they had practically unlimited access to the ready cash in high demand by producers, merchants, and state authorities in Afghanistan. These diversified and widely dispersed Indian merchant family firms combined the abilities to identify receptive markets for multiple commodities, to provide large or small cash loans, and to transfer large sums of capital through paper notes known as hundis in India and hawalas in Afghanistan. The Hindkis in nineteenth century Afghanistan are connected culturally and historically to communities of bankers, financiers, and large-scale traders associated with key Mughal markets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Multan and Shikarpur. Through the turbulent eighteenth century, the prominence of Multanis and Shikarpuris in state structures and political processes are expressions of continuity between Mughal and Durrani commercial regimes.
Cultural distinction did not impede the integration of Hindkis into Afghan society and state structures. It is thus unclear whether the Hindki community comprised a diaspora presence in Afghanistan, or if they should be considered a natural part of the economic landscape. From either perspective, Hindki communities should be viewed in light of their own social institutions and cultural practices in addition to those found in the “host” market settings. Features of local tribal cultures, such as melmastia and nanawati among Pashtuns, usually glossed as hospitality and asylum, respectively, are relevant for a holistic understanding of the local contexts in which Hindkis operated. A full sense of Hindki market positionings also requires attention to a more widely evident institution across the cultural communities forming Afghan society, hamsaya. Hamsaya is a Persian word, literally meaning shade-sharing, that has been interpreted to mean a neighborliness exhibited toward or an accepted protected status for local economic and social minority populations, such as the small-scale Tajik tenant farming families found in localities where Pashtuns are the primary landowners and demographic majority. The Hindkis comprised one segment of large-scale merchant activity involving complex exchange networks and systems of communication that were centered in the markets of North India. North India’s vast commercial resources and the social and economic structures that determined their movement and concentration in many ways dictated the terms of British colonial expansion in Hindustan and Afghanistan.8
The financial and marketing services provided by Hindki bankers and merchants in Afghanistan had another important dimension. The loans provided by these financiers to ordinary produ...

Table of contents