[PDF] Inter Regional Trade And Colonial State Formation In Nineteenth Century Afghanistan eBook

Author : Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 22,65 MB
Release : 2011-02-11
Category : History
ISBN : 0804777772

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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.

Author : William Dalrymple
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 494 pages
File Size : 47,27 MB
Release : 2013-04-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0307958299

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From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.

Author : Thomas Barfield
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 43,34 MB
Release : 2010-03-29
Category : History
ISBN : 1400834538

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A major history of Afghanistan and its changing political culture Afghanistan traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century to the Taliban resurgence today. Thomas Barfield introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them. He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed. Barfield vividly describes how Afghanistan's armed factions plunged the country into a civil war, giving rise to clerical rule by the Taliban and Afghanistan's isolation from the world. He examines why the American invasion in the wake of September 11 toppled the Taliban so quickly, and how this easy victory lulled the United States into falsely believing that a viable state could be built just as easily. Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the "graveyard of empires" for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.

Author : Stephen Frederic Dale
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 553 pages
File Size : 37,73 MB
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9004137076

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A critical biography of Zah?r al-Din Muhammad B?bur, the founder, in 1526, of the Timurid-Mughal Empire of India, offering

Author : Clay Goodloe Wescott
Publisher : Asian Development Bank
Page : 162 pages
File Size : 29,53 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Afghanistan
ISBN : 9715616143

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Developing country governments and international donors are taking notice of diasporas' potential contributions to economic development. Attention has primarily focused on the impressive totals of economic remittances, whose global estimates now outpace official development assistance. Three case studies of diaspora knowledge exchange/transfer: Afghanistan, People's Republic of China and the Philippines provide empirical and anecdotal data relating to: (a) knowledge exchange/transfer; (b) its potential relationship to economic remittances; (c) diaspora motivations; and (d) home country policies and programs. The potential for diaspora knowledge exchange suggests greater opportunities for gain than may be currently recognized and realized.

Author : Marvin G. Weinbaum
Publisher :
Page : 20 pages
File Size : 17,16 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Afghanistan
ISBN :

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The fate of Afghanistan and the success of U.S. and coalition efforts to stabilize Afghanistan will in large measure be affected by the current and future policies pursued by its varied proximate and distal neighbors. Weinbaum evaluates the courses of action Afghanistan's key neighbors are likely to take.

Author : Seteney Khalid Shami
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 502 pages
File Size : 27,18 MB
Release : 2016-11-15
Category : Education
ISBN : 1479827789

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Afterword: Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge -- Appendix: Producing Knowledge on World Regions: Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, 2000-Present -- About the Contributors -- Index