Afghanistan and India/South Asia

Visible in the activities of Afghan trading networks in South Asia is a rich and complex history of commercial, military, and political acumen, combined with a key role in mediating the connections between India’s markets and those of both Central and Inner Asia. Scholarship on the significance of Afghan networks in this region during the 18th century explores the ways in which the political dynamics not only of the territory of Afghanistan itself, but also the South Asian contexts in which Afghans settled were shaped by the specific forms of commercial activity Afghans involved themselves in. Afghan nomadic horse traders played a critical role in the establishment of series of “Indo-Afghan” political entities in north India. The political economies of these entities were intimately connected to the activities of Afghan traders in both the trans-Himalaya trade with Tibet and the cross-Hindu Kush trade with Central Asia.¹⁷ These trading networks were largely made-up of ethno-linguistically Pashto-speakers from the Indo-Afghan frontier region, a category of actor that played a critical role in establishing and consolidating commercial centers and networks in north India.¹⁸

While the rise of the British East India Company’s territorial dominion and subsequent imperial rule on the Indian subcontinent proved dire for the fortunes of the Afghan polity, Afghan trading networks adapted to new political circumstances. Traders identifying themselves as Afghan remained critical in terms of mediating South Asia’s relations with the markets of Central Asia and China, as well as those of Russia and Iran. Further, by linking these regional markets together, the Afghan merchant traders facilitated their integration into the globalizing economy of the 19th century. So-called trading tribes such as the “Powindahs” along the Indo-Afghan frontier played a critical role in the transport of goods—including Chinese tea, Afghan medicinal plants, and Mexican silver melted into Chinese yamboos—between northern India and Central Asia.¹⁹ This was especially true when trade routes intersected with nomadic itineraries, but the pressures and opportunities of trade also shaped those routes.²⁰ Merchant families (identifying themselves as Hindko-speaking Sethis) in the city of Peshawar were key brokers in the trade between South and Central Asia during the 19th century.²¹ Diasporic networks operating within Afghanistan—especially those identifying as Hindu and Sikhs—collectively designated as “Hindki” in some scholarship—were another group active in trade and its financing between India and Central Asia during this period.²² Money lenders and bankers from the Punjabi city of Multan and the Sindhi town of Shikarpur acted as finance agents in the trade between India and Central Asia.²³ These merchants were important not only for the regional economy, but the imperial one as well, even extending the credit necessary for the British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan during the First Afghan War. Such trading communities maintained merchant houses throughout Afghanistan and Central Asia’s great commercial centers of the time, especially Bukhara.²⁴ As with trading networks elsewhere, the activities of such networks fluctuated in relationship to the shifting fortunes of their commercial nodes.²⁵

Within British India, Afghan merchant networks filled significant niches for Indian society more generally, including the provision of dried fruits, vegetables, spices, and materia medica, and credit to the subcontinent’s expanding urban populations, especially those employed in the burgeoning industrial cities of Bombay and Calcutta. Afghan merchant traders were as important to the British India’s social and economic fabric as its famed Mawari traders.²⁶ The dynamics of Afghan trading and credit networks in India during the early 20th century remains less understood than its 19th-century predecessor. However, “Pathans” provided credit to striking workers employed in Bombay’s burgeoning textile factories, a practice contributing to negative stereotypes of them due to the collection of interest on the loans they issued.²⁷

The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 and the creation of the postcolonial independent states of India and Pakistan raised new concerns of an economic and logistical nature for Afghanistan’s trading networks, concerns that remain significant. The hardening of the Indo-Pakistan border following independence inevitably increased the costs to traders transporting agricultural products—especially dried fruit and nuts—from Afghanistan to India’s cities. While such trade continued, alongside the illicit movement of high value goods such as gold, Afghan traders in India were increasingly isolated from their homeland during this period.

Afghan trading networks in Pakistan faired differently in the post-1947 world. The country’s substantial population of ethno-linguistic Pashtuns meant that Afghan traders in predominantly Pashtun cities such as Peshawar, but also other Pakistani cities—especially Lahore and Karachi—with significant Pashtun communities, were often assimilated. A few Afghan communities located in Indian cities moved to Pakistan, especially Karachi, at the time of partition, though little is understood about such movements. Afghan trade networks in Pakistan received a boon with the signing in 1965 of the Afghanistan Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (ATTA), which allowed Afghan merchants to transit goods through Pakistan duty-free. Many profited from the illegal re-export of goods brought to Afghanistan under the ATTA back into Pakistan through informal and illicit trade routes. These have fed extensive market complexes in Pakistan’s Federally Associated Tribal Areas (FATA), most notably the Barra market, located in Khyber Agency on the peripheries of Peshawar. They have also had a pernicious and corrupting effect on the Pakistani state.

The influx of more than six million refugees following the Soviet invasion of 1979 resulted in further layers of Afghan commercial activity in Pakistan. From the 1980s onwards, Afghan refugees faced growing resentment from local populations and communities about their perceived control of particular sectors of the urban economy, such as butchery and transport, as well as the increasingly violent forms of competition with which such business activities were associated. With the fall of the Taliban in 2001, there followed a period of complex negotiations between Afghan traders, local communities, and the Pakistan state. Traders sought to remain in the country while also exploring the commercial possibilities available in Afghanistan. But Afghan residency rights, and more particularly the status and role of Afghan traders, are a politically contentious issue in Pakistan today. Changes to the ATTA implemented in 2010 reduced the volume of trade to markets previously burgeoning with smuggled goods, leading wealthy Afghan traders and their families to shift capital and businesses to Afghanistan, as well as Dubai and China. A crackdown on Afghan migrants living in Pakistan in 2015 led to significant numbers of traders moving their business and families out of the country, mostly to Afghanistan but also to the cities of the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey.

The activities of Afghan trading networks in India in the post-2001 period have benefitted from the close Afghanistan–Indian relationship. Ongoing restrictions on the transit of Indian goods through Pakistan en-route to Afghanistan continue to limit the activities of traders from Afghanistan in India. However, the increased possibilities and decreasing costs of airfreight between the two countries has enabled the transport of low weight to high value goods, a throwback to the haulage economics of pre-mechanized overland trade. These possibilities, though, are limited by complex and slow customs procedures which Afghan traders cite as reason for their preference to trade in commodities and raw materials between China and Afghanistan, rather than directly with India. The Chabahar Port in Iran has been developed by the governments of Afghanistan, Iran, and India between 2017 and 2018. A key goal of the project is to increase seaborne commercial exchanges between India and Afghanistan using a combination of the Chabahar port in the Persian Gulf and road connections to southwestern Afghanistan. The development of the port reflects ongoing difficulties in the transportation of goods from Afghanistan to India using the overland route through Pakistan. The ultimate efficacy and viability of these investments though has yet to be demonstrated.²⁸

Afghanistan and Central Asia/Eurasia

While Afghan merchant networks connected South and Central Asia, the importance of the latter to those networks extends far beyond its status as a destination point for Indian commodities and goods.

Afghan traders have historically played central roles in the bazaars and urban centers of Central Asia, using these not only as mercantile sites but also nodes from which to extend their networks into other parts of Eurasia, especially Russia. Traders from Afghanistan sold fruit from Central Asia in the bazaar in Nizhny Novgorod in imperial Russia and were even encouraged to attend the annual trade fair there by Tsar Nicholas I.²⁹ Afghan merchants invested in the Soviet industrial sector during the New Economic Policy years (1922–1928). And while Soviet trade between Moscow and Kabul was conducted in relationship to a formal barter arrangement, the tens of thousands of technical and university students from Afghanistan who studied in Soviet institutions were involved in a lively informal trade.³⁰ From Afghanistan, they carried Indian cloth to sell on the black market in the Soviet Union. They returned with teapots and Azerbaijani air conditioning units to sell in Kabul.³¹

Since the 1990s, trading networks composed of traders from Afghanistan have once again been active in the economies of Central Asia, as well as those of Russia and the post-Soviet world more generally. Afghan merchants have been a mainstay in bazaars across Central Asia—notably Almaty, Dushanbe, Khujand, and Tashkent—since the Soviet collapse in 1991, serving in multifaceted and dynamic roles. Traders from Afghanistan supplied Central Asians with food stuffs and other commodities from Iran, Turkey, and South Asia in particular, again assuming their historic role as middlemen between Central Asia and other world regions. In the 2000s, such traders became increasingly active in the trade of Chinese goods in Russia and Ukraine, countries where they established multiple trading nodes in cities such as St Petersburg, Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, and Krasnodar in Russia, and Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa in Ukraine. Successful trading networks depended on contacts with regional security officials cultivated during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan for the protection of their collective and individual activities. Many of the traders who established these trading networks were themselves formerly state officials in the pro-Soviet Afghan government of the 1980s. Past ideological commitments played a central role in cultivating the relationships critical for their commercial activities.³²

Complementing such ideologically-based networks, other Afghan traders active in the Soviet Union cultivated historically salient ethno-linguistic and religious identities. Into the first decades of the 21st century, Hindu and Sikh traders form an important part of Afghan trading networks in the former Soviet space. Reprising their role from the imperial pasts, “Hindki” traders often supply credit and commodities on credit to traders of Muslim background from Afghanistan working in the bazaars of Russia and Ukraine.³³

As with South Asia’s Pashtuns, the distinction between Central Asian and Afghan merchants is a blurred one subject to continual and complex negotiation. Afghanistan’s northern borderlands with the Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan were formerly associated with the Central Asian khanates, such as Bukhara, Merv, Khoqand, and Khiva, until the early 19th century.³⁴ Bukhara was long an important center and hub of transregional Asian trade which reached as far as Iran, Muscovy, Siberia, the Ottoman Empire, China, and India.³⁵ The city, through Afghan and other merchant networks such as Armenians, exported goods, including the region’s high-quality cotton materials and sheepskin furs. At the same time, it imported and transited goods from across Asia. Rhubarb purchased in China and Siberia was, for example, sold in Iran and the Ottoman world where it was regarded as an essential medicinal ingredient. Likewise, Bukharan merchants purchased valuable furs in Siberia, and sold these in Iran. Officials frequently imposed barriers on the ability of Bukharan merchants to operate across these contexts. Muscovy’s rulers were concerned that the Bukharan merchants should not take excessive quantities of good fur from their territory, less its value decrease for the Shahs of Iran, to whom the tsars often presented high quality furs as diplomatic gifts.

Not all Bukharan and Central Asian merchants operated in this mobile manner. Some individual merchants were permanently settled outside of the Emirate, owning land and running businesses in places like Siberia and Qing-controlled Turkestan.³⁶ Regional authorities recognized the significance of such merchants for local economies, allowing the merchants to trade without paying taxes on their activities. In addition to dealing with far away people and their rulers, Bukhara’s merchants also engaged in close trading relations with communities surrounding the urban centers in which they were based. Around Bukhara itself, they traded with Turkmen tribesmen for lamb, fox fur, and carpets and provided Bukhara’s elite with fermented mare’s milk.

With the integration of Bukhara into the Tsarist and later Soviet empires, Bukhara’s merchants and their transregional activities, as well as the city’s historic status as an urban commercial center declined. In the wake of the Soviet conquest of Central Asia, an unknown proportion of Bukhara’s commercial community fled to Iran, Afghanistan, Chinese Turkestan, and India. There they settled, reshaping the societies and states to which they fled. Bukharan émigrés to northern Afghanistan adapted to a new set of circumstances in what at the time was officially referred to as “Afghan Turkestan.”³⁷ They brought with them the trade of karakul lamb pelt, which continued to be of importance to the émigrés from Central Asia who also became active in related commercial fields such as the sale of meat and animal skins. Northern Afghanistan’s fur trade also attracted Farsi-speaking Afghan Jewish traders and financiers based in the cities of Kabul and Herat, as well as Ashkenazi and Bukharan Jews who had fled the violence that affected their lives and commercial activities in Baku, Bukhara, Samarqand, and Tashkent. A purported fear amongst Afghan government officials that Bolshevik agents were working in Afghanistan disguised as Jewish traders, resulted not only in the expulsion of Jewish Central Asian émigrés from Afghanistan, but also, eventually, the departure of the country’s sizeable Jewish community to Israel.³⁸ Though reduced in numbers and influence, Jewish traders continued to play a role as financiers in the bazaars of Kabul and Herat until the 1970s.

Many of these émigré Central Asian merchants made their fortunes and reputations with Afghanistan’s most iconic commodity: the carpet. The modern trade in “Bukharan” carpets to European and American markets stretches back to the 18th century.³⁹ Émigrés’ ability to play an important role in this commercial niche in Afghanistan builds on a long and intimate knowledge of the activity. Some of Afghanistan’s best-known merchants, especially respected for the innovative role they played in the production and distribution of carpets, come from families that crossed the Amu Darya and migrated to Afghanistan in the late 1920s and 1930s. Such merchants were reputed for “establishing small factories in northern Afghanistan that employed men and children to weave cheap carpets specifically for the Western market.”⁴⁰ Moreover, they opened transport companies connecting the cities of northern Afghanistan to Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, as well as creating international business networks, most especially in the centers of the carpet trade: Hamburg, Hannover, and Istanbul.

Central Asia’s importance lay not only in the fact that it was a region with which traders from Afghanistan interacted, but also in the role that migration between the two contexts played in the production of particular trading networks that have subsequently become associated with Afghanistan. It was thus both receptive and productive of Afghan trading networks.

Afghanistan and the Arabian Peninsula/the Persian Gulf

In the expanding body of historical and anthropological literature on the Indian Ocean, there is a significant emphasis on merchant communities from the Arabian Peninsula connecting disparate contexts across this vast maritime realm. By contrast, images of Afghan communities in the peninsula tend to crystallize around the figure of the migrant laborer, devoid of citizenship and respect in the notoriously hierarchical Gulf States. From the 2000s onwards more scholarship however, has nuanced the historic presence of Afghans not only as laborers but also as merchants and itinerant traders in the Arabian Peninsula—a presence that dates to at least the 18th century but was intensified by the steam-powered revolution of the late 19th century.⁴¹ By the late 19th century “Zanzibari” intermediaries, European firms and Afghan traders interacted with one another in port cities such as Muscat, exchanging arms and ammunition, as well as human bodies.⁴² Afghan arms dealers dealt with the Europeans and Americans as a result of the Sultan’s commercial agreements.⁴³

The Bolshevik revolution in Central Asia led to an influx of refugees, including commercial and merchant families, to the holy cities of the Hejaz: Mecca and Madinah. While communities of Central Asians were present in the hajj before the wave of migrants from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, playing the role of middleman between official Arab pilgrimage guides and Central Asian pilgrims, their numbers increased exponentially with the refugee influx.⁴⁴ These refugee communities were joined by later émigrés who fled Chinese Turkestan after the collapse of the Turkistan state in 1949 or found themselves conducting pilgrimage in Arabia as the events unfolded in China.⁴⁵ While in no simple sense “Afghan”, such families were often closely related to Central Asian families that relocated to Afghanistan in the 1920s. Such connections were maintained in the settings of exile by visits of Afghanistan-based relatives to the Hejaz on the hajj. Pilgrims continued to travel to Saudi Arabia from Afghanistan by road until at least the 1970s. Such journeys offered important trading possibilities. Saudi Arabia-based Central Asians also visited Afghanistan and invested in the expanding business portfolios of their fellow Central Asian émigrés in the country. Against the backdrop of political tensions in Afghanistan in the 1970s, Central Asian émigré families in Afghanistan—now Afghan citizens—increasingly moved their families and investments out of Kabul, a popular destination being Saudi Arabia, where they were able to join wider communities, and also establish businesses. In this manner, networks composed of Afghanistan’s Central Asian émigrés became increasingly important to urban life in Saudi Arabia. Yet their economic position, like that of all foreigners in the country, remained precarious as it depended on partnerships with sponsoring Saudi nationals. Having familiarized themselves with the complex commercial environment of Saudi Arabia and aware of their relative precariousness, such networks and the families from which they arose also often sought to diversify their savings and locate their families outside Saudi Arabia. A substantial concentration of such families arose in Istanbul’s western residential districts, a setting in which Afghan Central Asian émigrés have also successfully secured Turkish citizenship.⁴⁶

Alongside such historic connections between traders in Afghanistan and the Arabian Peninsula, Afghan networks have extended into the markets of the Gulf from the late 1970s onwards. Against the backdrop of war and conflict in the Afghanistan, and the opportunities offered by the regulation-light oil rich Gulf economies, vibrant Afghan trading communities migrated to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman. Traders from the eastern Afghan province of Paktika, who mostly identify themselves as being of Kharoti tribal background, established themselves in the textiles trade, buying largely from East Asia (initially South Korea, today the city of Keqiao in China’s eastern Zhejiang province) and selling to Africans and Central Asians.⁴⁷ Shi’i and Sunni merchants who identify themselves as ethnically Hazara are principally based in Sharjah and specialize in trading secondhand vehicles and spare parts. Cars imported from Japan, Europe, and North America are sold to customers in Afghanistan and east Africa. A Hazara community in Japan is directly connected to this UAE-centered trade.

West Asia/Ottoman Lands

Afghan trading networks were widely dispersed throughout the lands of the Ottoman Empire and remained so in the post-colonial successor states following its collapse in the aftermath of World War I. They ranged from Basra to Jerusalem and Istanbul. Their presence raises important questions about both the relationship between Afghanistan and the Ottoman world as well as the complex forms of imperial subjecthood that Afghans abroad availed themselves to.⁴⁸ Circulations of pilgrims and merchants between Afghanistan and the Ottoman Empire were connected to an infrastructure of religious institutions (notably Sufi lodges) in which pilgrims and traders stayed, much like in Afghanistan itself.⁴⁹ Afghan itinerant merchants drew upon multiple forms of imperial jurisdictional subjecthoods during their sojourns, especially when their commercial activities were affected by insecurity and crime. As Afghanistan had ceded its foreign policy and consular affairs to the British Indian government, Afghans petitioned for representation from the officials of British India when running afoul of Ottoman authorities.⁵⁰

Sufi lodges played a major role in accommodating traders in the course of their travels through the Ottoman lands and beyond. The importance of Sufi lodges in the Ottoman context raises wider issues regarding the extent to which particular Afghan trading networks were structured in relationship to ties of trust dependent on shared membership of Sufi brotherhoods, such as the Naqshbandiya-Mojadeddi. These brotherhoods provided networks of knowledge, not only religious but commercial as well, and an infrastructure of commerce in the form of their sisilas (religious orders) and tekke (lodges) which safeguarded merchants in lands where their physical safety could not be guaranteed, and indeed were sometimes violated by political authorities.⁵¹ Commercial and religious forms of affiliation overlapped in the 19th century, continuing a long tradition common throughout much of the Muslim world.⁵² By contrast, the hostile policies toward Sufis introduced both by Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the 20th century seems to have reduced the role played by Sufi brotherhoods in commercial relationships of trust. An absence of public affiliation to Sufism amongst Afghan traders in Turkey underscores a complex interplay of change and continuity in the dynamics of trading networks and the role played by new religious and moral idioms in the fashioning of long-distance ties of trust.

East and Southeast Asia and Australasia

Afghan merchants have a long history in East Asia, dating back to the earliest days of the Silk Road. Lapis lazuli from Badakhshan was an import commodity in the imperial capital of the T’ang dynasty, Xi’an.⁵³ There is, however, considerably less understanding of the nature and role played by Afghan trading networks in China over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Chinese goods filtered overland through Afghan trade networks into British India throughout the 19th century.⁵⁴ Close commercial and political relations between Badakhshan, Kashgar, and Yarkand continued until the 1940s.⁵⁵ In his narrative of a journey to the source of the Oxus, the colonial scholar-official John Wood recounts meeting traders from Yarkand in the village of Jurm in Badakhshan. Wood also encountered a Jew involved in the trade between Chinese Turkestan and Central Asia.⁵⁶ Likewise, Robert Shaw’s account of an expedition to Chinese Turkestan reported an encounter with an Englishman living the life of a mendicant only with the support of an Afghan trader on the route between Yarkand and Kashgar.⁵⁷ The British Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein also reported working with antique dealers and rare book dealers active in eastern China during his spells conducting research in the region between 1900 and 1930.⁵⁸ Even the political fortunes of Yarkand were intimately tied with those of Kabul. After the Xinjiang revolts of 1864, Ghulam Husayn—who hailed “from a notable family in Kabul”—became leader of Yarkand.⁵⁹ After the collapse of the Emirate of Turkestan in 1949 and the incorporation of eastern Turkestan within the People’s Republic of China little is known about the presence or otherwise of Afghan traders in China.

In contrast, Japan was an important destination for traders from Afghanistan in the first decades of the 20th century.⁶⁰ Japanese products were imported into Afghanistan by Japan-based Afghan agents—often of Hindu and Sikh background—while the family firms of Central Asian émigrés in Afghanistan cultivated their reputation for being trustworthy suppliers of high-quality foreign goods through the sale of Japanese products. From the 1980s communities of Hazara (especially from the Darra-e Turkmen valley in the central province of Parwan) migrated to Japan to act as agents and labor in the expanding trade in secondhand cars, with a key hub in Sharjah in the UAE. A few such individuals and their families were able to legalize their status in Japan and are now mostly based in the Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo.⁶¹

Afghan trading networks have also been active in Hong Kong from at least the 1980s onwards, interacting with established communities of “Pathans” who moved to the imperial outpost from British India in connection with the security services.⁶² Electronics and other items (notably bicycles referred to in Kabul as “Chinese”) were sourced by traders in Hong Kong for export to Afghanistan. Hong Kong previously served as a key node in the worldwide trade in lapis lazuli, although its role today has been eclipsed by cities in southern China as well as Bangkok. Up to fifty Afghan trading offices reportedly operated in the city during the 1980s and early 1990s. Additionally, South Korea was an important node for textile traders working out of Afghanistan but also South Asia and the Gulf, until the 2000s at which point most traders shifted their principle procurement activities to China. Much of Afghanistan’s most popular drink (green tea) is sourced by Afghan merchants in Vietnam—a country to which they also export Afghan cumin.

After China opened its economy in the early 1990s, Afghan trading networks established a visible presence in Chinese cities that are globally important nodes for the long-distance trade in low-grade commodities. In the early 1990s, the node of these trading networks established was the western city of Urumqi. The city was easily accessible by flight from Kabul and was also located on the land routes used by Afghan traders working both in the post-Soviet settings and South Asia. As this type of economic activity increasingly shifted to cities along China’s eastern seaboard, there has also been a geographic shift in the location of the nodes of Afghan trading networks. Yiwu and Guanghzhou are currently the most significant cities for Afghan traders in China—Yiwu being the base to around 4,000 traders from Afghanistan.⁶³ Afghans based in each of these cities run transport and trading officers to facilitate the commercial activities of Afghans involved in what anthropologists refer to as “globalisation from below.”⁶⁴ The shift of traders out of western China has been further intensified by the increasingly surveillance of Muslim traders in Xinjiang by the Chinese state.

The activities of Afghan trading networks in Malaysia and Thailand—like those in Hong Kong—are connected to the British colonial period through the circulation of “Pathans” who were employed as police and watchmen in Malaysia, eventually establishing themselves as traders and merchants. In Malaysia “Pathans” are active in the textile trade, supplying the country and also neighboring predominantly Muslim regions of Thailand with cloth purchased in South Korea and China. Indeed, “Pathan” networks in Thailand have not only been active in the commodity trade but have also earned themselves a name for producing leading actors in the local film industry.⁶⁵ From the mid-2000s onwards, Malaysia and Indonesia are both attractive sites for trade investment by Afghan entrepreneurs. Afghans active in the trade in commodities produced from palm oil (especially cooking oil and substances required in the manufacture of cosmetics) are active in both places. This trend has been invigorated by new taxation arrangements in the UAE, making the country a less attractive base than previously. Traders who identify themselves as Afghan are active in the oriental carpet trade in Singapore—their businesses being appropriately located a few steps away from the city’s Kandahar Street.

Afghan merchant networks have also been present in Australia since at least the mid-19th century. Their presence originated with a remarkable story of the shipment of camels and their human handlers (approximately one per eight camels) from the Indo-Afghan frontier to Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The need for camels arose in Australia against the backdrop of a significant rise in population density in the country’s coastal regions, leading to the settling of its desert interior. The first shipment of camels was organized in 1865 by Scottish traders based in Australia. There followed a number of shipments of camels and camel handlers until 1907. Afghan settlers in Australia comprised individuals connected through language, culture and history to the Indo-Afghan frontier but who also had for long been sojourners in South Asia’s cities, including most especially Karachi.⁶⁶

Western Europe and the Americas

While imperial metropoles in Europe and America have not been as important for Afghan trading networks as for transnational traders with connections to parts of the world more clearly integrated within imperial commerce, Afghans have nevertheless secured commercial footholds in advanced economies.⁶⁷ In this sense, they may be contrasted with other Asian trade networks that encountered problems in extending their activities into the West.⁶⁸

Afghans have had a long relationship with and presence in Western Europe, particularly in Germany.⁶⁹ This relationship goes back at least to the reign of Amanullah Khan, the reforming Amir who gained Afghanistan independence from the British in 1919 and was a noted Germanophile.⁷⁰ It is no surprise, then, that Germany has served as the center for many of the trading activities undertaken by Afghan merchant networks. During the Cold War, visa free travel to West Germany and the easy processing of visas for Afghan citizens in Communist East Germany meant that Afghans were able to engage in a trade of goods from the West in the eastern bloc countries, and vice versa. Luminaries in the trade in Afghan and Central Asian carpets, such as the ethnically Turkmen Aqmurad Boy, established warehouses in Hamburg from the 1970s onwards. These Turkmen traders even claimed a space in the most German of culinary markets, sausages, supplying from Afghanistan significant volumes of animal intestine that was processed for the manufacture of sausage skins.

Afghan merchant networks have an established history in other financial and commercial hubs of Western Europe and North America as well. The sale of Afghanistan’s famed karakul furs, which supplied the New York fashion world in the 1950s, allowed traders to hold bank accounts in the United States, which they used to invest capital in North American markets.⁷¹ This was such an important trade that the Afghan government’s foreign reserves were generated from it and in part financed the Helmand Valley Authority development project.⁷²

Afghans have successfully embedded their networks in North America and Western Europe not only through trade in high-value goods, but also through smaller-scale trading and service activities. In a remarkable range of settings both before and after the expanding numbers of refugees entering such contexts from the mid-1980s onwards Afghans have also proven adept financial players and businessmen. A more commonplace setting in which to find Afghan trading networks in operation in Western settings is, however, in urban and often ethnically-based niche economies. In London, Afghans are purveyors of cloth and tropical fish to African and Caribbean communities.⁷³ In Los Angeles shopkeepers of Afghan background work in socially fraught neighborhoods and alongside migrant entrepreneurs from different contexts, including those of Jewish, East Asian, and Latin American origins.⁷⁴ In Philadelphia and Washington, DC, as in many other U.S. cities, Afghan émigrés, including the Karzai family, own restaurants serving both their own communities and the larger American public they are now part of. Similarly, traders of Afghan background based in Canadian cities such as Toronto are connected to their compatriots based elsewhere in the world, especially in Sharjah to which Canada-based traders frequently send secondhand vehicles.

A fascinating new arena where Afghan trader-refugees are establishing themselves is Latin America. Historians have explored the migration of “Pathans” from India to the British Guyana and Surinam in the context of “coolie labor” programs in the 19th century.⁷⁵ In the 21st century, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have granted asylum to small numbers of Afghan refugees—nascent communities that our Afghan interlocutors in China inform us are now playing an active role in business activities, such as the import of Chilean wood to China. The trade in semi-precious stones—a field of commercial active in which Afghans play a prominent global role—has also led Afghans to travel to and settle in new contexts. U.S.-based Afghans frequently visit Mexico to purchase semi-precious stones they then sell in Hong Kong and China. Afghans have also established companies dealing in gemstones in Africa, especially in Nigeria and Zambia. The rise in migration of refugees from Afghanistan to Europe and elsewhere from 2015 onwards will no doubt result in both the consolidation and also extension of the presence of Afghan traders in many settings.

The organization of these networks of Afghan traders has varied over time and space. Collectively, they have demonstrated a remarkable ability to both adapt to changing circumstances and exploit new opportunities. These networks have relied upon solidarities of kinship, ethnicity, language, and in the 2nd half of the 20th century ideology and professional connection. The Sufi tarikas (orders) have given way to common connections born of Marxist education, which have themselves given way to new bonds based on a shared refugee experience. Compared to other merchant networks, such as the Marwari and Hadrami traders whose activities have been geographically concentrated and business interests relatively limited, the Afghan trading networks have been both catholic in their commercial ventures and globally spread. This is partly a consequence of the size of these networks, itself a function of the fungibility of what it means to be “Afghan.” The relative porousness of this identity has meant that participation in these networks remains potentially open to a global population of Afghans numbering in the tens of millions. Thus, Turkmen and Uzbek traders specializing in sausage production with ties to Germany sit alongside Australian-born Afghan refugee entrepreneurs introducing mobile phone and television networks in Afghanistan today. This is to say nothing of the changes over time which have been largely shaped by the opening and closing of markets and opportunities for this diverse array of traders.

Discussion of the Literature

The form and nature of Afghanistan’s global connections has emerged as a vibrant focus of inter-disciplinary scholarship from the 2000s.⁷⁶ The scholarly study of Afghanistan formerly dwelled on the country’s supposed isolation from the outside world, and the purported insulation of its social structures and culture from the forces of colonialism and modernity that had transformed other parts of Asia. Since the 2000s, scholarship has begun the task of reinstating Afghanistan in wider, often global, dynamics. Against this analytical backdrop, there has been a focus on the connective role played by Afghan traders, detailing not only the insights that a consideration of this category of actors reveal about Afghanistan’s economy, but also into myriad developments across the field of culture, politics, and religion.⁷⁷

This expanding body of scholarship shares an over-arching concern with the agency demonstrated by Afghan actors, especially in fashioning connections between the country and settings beyond.⁷⁸ The connective powers of Afghan traders also transgress a range of scales, from the regional to the transregional and also the global.⁷⁹ Afghan agency has been analyzed through considerations of the ways in which traders have negotiated the modernizing Afghan state and its attempts to divert the profits of merchants into state coffers.⁸⁰ There is also growing recognition of the responses of Afghan traders to shifts in the global economy—recognized by historians from the 2000s as being as important to the landlocked country as to Asia’s great maritime economies.⁸¹

From the 2000s onwards scholarship has also benefited from collaborations between historians and anthropologists. A thematic focus of much scholarship has been the importance of trust to the activities of long-distance Afghan traders.⁸² Scholars have debated the relative significance of ethnicity and kinship to the making relationships of trust. They have also brought attention to the analytical problems of an over-emphasis on trust, by distinguishing between “trust” and “trustworthiness,” and addressed how—from the perspective of merchants themselves—it is the ability to be a successful trader in a wider context of mistrust that deserves critical insight and reflection.⁸³

As in the study of other trading networks, scholarship has simultaneously explored the mobility of traders and the strategies that such traders use to anchor themselves to particular trading nodes.⁸⁴ Afghan long-distance traders have deployed a combination of specific financial practices, especially loan provisioning, and knowledge of the law in order to fashion and sustain ties to the communities amongst which they live. One such “anchoring strategy” is investment in property.⁸⁵ Another is marriage to local women.⁸⁶ Ethnographic work on Afghan trading networks has also brought attention to the role played by linguistic and cultural competence in the overseas activities of Afghan merchants.⁸⁷ This empirical finding also raises conceptual issues about how far it is helpful to think of such networks as “cosmopolitan,” and, if so, whether these are distinctly “Islamic.”⁸⁸

The emerging literature on Afghan trading networks is interestingly positioned in relationship to the so-called “oceanic turn,” a development in scholarship that has increasingly located sea-based perspectives at the center of the study of inter-Asian connections.⁸⁹ It is tempting to assume that Afghan trade networks stand to reveal a great deal about the nature of inland trade and connections, a thematic area overshadowed in the 2000s in particular by the focus on the Indian Ocean. Yet studies of Afghan networks have nuanced debate about the distinction between the inland and oceanic worlds. The participation of Afghan traders in the trading nodes of the Arabian Gulf stretches back to long before the oil boom and connected foreign worker influx of the 1970s. Similarly, peripatetic Afghan trading networks also operated in Ottoman port cities, such as Basra, Istanbul, and Jeddah—all settings in which Afghan communities continue to work in the first decades of the 21st century.

Scholarship across anthropology and history on Afghan trading networks is leading to new developments in the conceptualization of Afghanistan. It is challenging the salience of models that treat the country as an isolated buffer state crafted by Great Game politics and emphasizing instead the role that mobile and adaptable networks have played in connecting it to multiple settings beyond. This scholarship also highlights the importance of multiple forms of agency—especially a critical responsiveness to shifting global political and economic dynamics, increasingly referred to as “everyday” or “informal” diplomacy, and the ability to navigate between multiple jurisdictional subjecthoods—to Afghanistan’s people. Further consideration of the activities of Afghan traders stands to reveal a great deal about the geographic assumptions that have shaped the burgeoning field of inter-Asia studies.