Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier

Connecting Histories in Afghanistan

Connecting Histories in

AFGHANISTAN

Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

First published in paperback in 2011

© 2008 Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the Columbia University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud.

Connecting histories in Afghanistan : market relations and state formation on a colonial frontier / Shah Mahmoud Hanifi.

pages cm

Originally published online in 2008 by Columbia University Press.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047–7411-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Afghanistan—Commerce—History—19th century. 2. Afghanistan— Politics and government—19th century. 3. Afghanistan—Commerce— India—History—19th century. 4. India—Commerce—Afghanistan— History—19th century. 5. Great Britain—Colonies—Asia—Commerce. 6. Great Britain—Colonies—Asia—Economic policy. I. Title.

HF3770.6.H36 2011

382.09581’054—dc22

2010043063

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion.

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-7777-3

De Afghanistan De Kochniano Depara Baraye Atfal-e Afghanistan

Contents

List of Maps and Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Preface: Querying the Kabul Hypothesis

Part I. Colonial Market Knowledge and Commercial Experimentation

Introduction: The Historical Location and Conceptual Framing of Afghanistan

1. Financing the Kabul Produce

2. Contracting Nomadic Carriage for an Aquatic Agenda

3. Fiscal Instability and State Revenue Reformulation during the First British Occupation

Part II. The New Outdated Colonial Political Economy

4. Capital Concentrations and Coordinations: Peshawar Subsidies and Kabul Workshops

5. New State Texts and Old Commercial Flows

6. Mutual Evasion between Afghanistan and the Global Marketplace

Conclusion: Deflecting Colonial Canons and Cannons—

Alternate Routes to Knowing Afghanistan

Appendix : Commercial Vocabulary in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan

Note on Sources: Abbreviations, Transliterations and Spellings

Notes

Sources and Notes for Maps and Figures

Bibliography

Index

List of Maps and Figures

Maps

1.1. Interregional Satellite Map, 2008

1.2. Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar Satellite View, 2008

1.3. Proto-Afghanistan, 1844

1.4. Proto-Afghanistan, 1846

1.5. Proto-Afghanistan, 1856

Figures

1.1. Grape Drying Hut in Vineyard, 2004

1.2. Peshawar Market, 1930s

2.1. Full Accounting of Sayyid Muhin Shahs Fourth British-Sponsored Commercial Experiment in Central Asia, 1835

2.2. Afghan Nomads and Commerce, 1978

4.1. Kabul Subsidy Receipt, 1908

4.2. Abd al-Rahman Document for John P. Guthrie, 1898

4.3. Mashin Khana Aerial Photograph, c. 1960s

4.4. Mashin Khana Interior Illustration, 1893

5.1. Landowners and Laborers in Kabul, 1878

5.2. Public Execution, 1913

(Sources and notes for the maps and figures appear on pages 239–42)

List of Tables

2.1. Summary of Sayyid Muhin Shah’s First British-Sponsored Commercial Experiment in Central Asia, 1831–32

2.2. Summary of Sayyid Muhin Shah’s Fourth British-Sponsored Commercial Experiment in Central Asia, 1835

4.1. British Cash Subsidies Granted to Abd al-Rahman from His Appointment to the Durrani Throne in July 1880 to December 1881

4.2.Shikarpuri Hindu Bankers/Merchants (of Kabul) Paid (in Peshawar) from Abd al-Rahman’s November 1883 Subsidy

4.3. Select Subsidy Redistributions to Durrani State Commercial Agents in Bombay and Karachi

4.4. Commodities Purchased with Subsidy Money by Durrani State Commercial Agents Based in India and Conveyed Duty-Free from Peshawar to Kabul through the Khaibar Pass in 1898

Acknowledgments

Because this work grew out of my research and time at the University of Michigan, I would like to restate my gratitude to the institution as a whole. The Department of History was my home base, and as such the object of my deepest gratitude. The departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies also figured prominently in my years there, and to those units I convey my sincere appreciation for hosting and expanding my interests. At the University of Michigan, I received seemingly unlimited generosity from a number of faculty members, committees, and administrative personnel in and across those three departments and through the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the Center for South Asian Studies. I am particularly grateful to Professor Juan R. I. Cole for his sustained support, unceasing encouragement, and continually productive critique of my work. Also my thanks go to Professors Ronald G. Suny, Thomas R. Trautmann, Andrew Shryock, and Kathryn Babayan, and Professor Sir Christopher Bayly, who though not present in Michigan influenced my experiences in distant but important ways from St. Catharine’s College at Cambridge University. Professors Shryock and Suny were very helpful and supportive over the long term and at critical junctures of research and writing. Professor Trautmann bestowed the gift of an editorial assistantship at the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History on me, and that experience is one I particularly cherish and continue to draw benefits from. My CSSH experience stands as a key symbol for all that I received at and from the University of Michigan.

I am also grateful to the organizations that funded the research on which this book depends. The list begins with a grant from the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, which combined with funds provided by the American Institute of Iranian Studies to allow for a preliminary canvassing of research sites in India and Pakistan. Subsequent research in South Asia was made possible through grants from the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Near and Middle East Research and Training Act, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers in conjunction with the American Institute of Indian Studies and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.

During the course of my research in South Asia I incurred a great many personal and institutional debts. My research was based at the Archives of the North-West Frontier Province in Peshawar, the Archives of the Punjab Province in Lahore, and the National Archives of India in New Delhi. My research encompassed other repositories including the Tribal Affairs Research Cell in Peshawar and the Area Study Centre for Central Asia Library at Peshawar University, the National Documentation Centre in Islamabad, the Library at the Centre of Advanced Study in History at Aligarh Muslim University, and the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna, although little of those materials has found its way into this book. I am pleased to renew my gratitude to the administrators, archivists, and staff at all these institutions. I would also like to thank the staffs at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, at James Madison University’s Carrier Library, and at the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.

I am grateful to Dr. Michael Galgano in the History Department at James Madison University, who has consistently supported my efforts on this and many other projects, and to Dr. David Akin who more than any other taught me how to write. Kate Wahl at Stanford University Press deserves a special note of gratitude for taking interest in my work and for her helpful guidance throughout all stages of the print publication process.

My parents, Dr. M. Jamil and Marietta Hanifi, have shown me the grand complexity, the beautiful simplicity, and the general productivity of cross-cultural interaction that energizes this book in many ways. My father has shaped and challenged my thinking at every stage of my development and this book is fundamentally a product of his cultural and intellectual influence on me. I would rather be in no other physical place or socio-cultural position than in my father’s Way. My mother has taught me about dedication and perseverance and how to enjoy every moment even when the work-at-hand seems overwhelming. In doing so she has epitomized selflessness, generosity, and tolerance. To my wife Martie, son Qais Jabar, and daughter Ariana Aliya I cannot say enough. You have contributed in tangible ways to this book through many dosages of help with images, citations, and a large number of other technical and labor-intensive issues, but your constant encouragement and support over the long term is what allows this book and me to be. Martie, the efforts and sacrifices you have made for me involve exponentially more than any single book. Together we have successfully navigated many challenging segments on the road of life and your superhuman commitment to me and my work has and will always energize and motivate me. Qais Jabar and Ariana Aliya, your names carry the burden of Braudel’s longue duree, but this book has compromised many ‘mere events’ in your lives. Please know you are my world’s most amazing treasures, that I cherish every single moment in your presence, and that when we are apart thoughts of you swell my mind and heart with incalculable joy and pride.

Preface: Querying the Kabul Hypothesis

This book situates nineteenth-century Afghanistan in the context of British Indian colonialism. The general focus is commerce, mainly how local actors including Afghan nomads and Indian bankers responded to state policies regarding popular and lucrative commodities such as fruit and tea. Within those broad commercial concerns, specific attention is given to developments in and between the urban market settings of Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar. The colonial political emphasis on Kabul had significant commercial consequences for that city and its economic connections to the two cities it displaced to become the sole capital of the emerging state. The Kabul hypothesis therefore represents a colonial political strategy, and its effects on Kabul-Peshawar and Kabul-Qandahar economic relations are the subject of this book.

There are two basic conclusions to be drawn from the work as a whole. The first runs against standard interpretations of nineteenth-century Afghanistan. In most renditions of this period, Afghanistan remains immune from colonialism emanating from British India due to the outcomes of the two Anglo-Afghan wars of 1839–42 and 1878–80. The two conflicts are usually interpreted simply as either exceptional failures for the British imperial invaders or predictable victories for the local Afghan defenders. The basic point made in what follows is that despite the military results of the two wars, Afghanistan is in fact a colonial construct in political, economic, and intellectual terms, at least. However, it will also be made clear that Afghanistan’s colonial moorings in British India by no means denied agency to local actors. A secondary conclusion derived from the facts of colonialism’s determining influence on Afghanistan is that the development of a relatively strong state in the late nineteenth century signaled the beginning of intensifying market hardships for most Afghans.

Chronology Overview and Content Summary

At the state level, there are two principal groups of actors under consideration, namely, British colonial officials and representatives of the Afghan state. The relationship between those two political communities was conditioned by inequalities, ambiguities, and inconsistencies characterizing colonial encounters elsewhere in nineteenth-century India, and beyond. The political relationship between Afghan state officials and British colonial authorities in the 1800s evolved through a three-phase chronology of engagement, distancing, and re-engagement. The book is correspondingly organized on the basis of experimental, interim, and routinization phases that can be outlined as follows.

The experimental period begins in 1809 with the arrival of the first British colonial delegation at the Afghan court. It ends with the annihilation of the first British invasion force in 1842. The initial thirty-three years of British Indian contact with nascent Afghanistan involved a number of commercial experiments that in many ways culminated with the first Anglo-Afghan war. After a swift retribution campaign to account for the Afghan disaster, the British generally kept political distance from Kabul for another thirty years or so until a second phase of more direct and re-intensified interaction began. The experimental period is richly documented by archival and published sources.

This interim period from the end of the first war in 1842 until the beginning of the second war in 1878 was an active one both locally and globally. This period of intense industrialization involved the large-scale development of railroads, telegraphy, and transoceanic steamship trade and travel that transformed an increasingly international and integrated world economy. Because there was not substantial or sustained contact between Durrani state and British colonial authorities during this interim phase, the period is weakly documented and as such not considered in this work. However, the transformations that occurred in terms of global commerce and the advancement of industrial technology reframed the context in which the second phase of active Anglo-Afghan relations occurred.

The second part of the book considers Abd al-Rahman’s reign, for which there is a great deal of archival and published material available. In 1880 the British appointed Abd al-Rahman as the Amir of Kabul to facilitate their evacuation at the end of a second failed occupation, and he ruled until his death in 1901. During this twenty-one-year period, Afghanistan’s relationship with British India was routinized in a number of ways. The Abd al-Rahman period is also significant for standardizing state-society relations in Afghanistan.

The periodization described earlier and detailed later in this work follows military and political calendars associated with the two Anglo-Afghan wars. In terms of content, however, each part of the book considers a different set of economic actors and sectors. After establishing Kabul’s roles as a center of production and as a transition market, the first part of the book deals with the commercial contracts around which the British engaged local people to exploit the grounded and mobile resources previously identified. It also considers a larger grand plan for Kabul and its markets in relation to the global economy, and discusses the transformation of local commercial institutions and practices that occurred in the context of the first colonial occupation.

The second part of the book deals with Abd al-Rahman’s reign and his relationship to the British by focusing on the cash subsidies he received, and how those resources were part of broader program of reconfiguring Afghanistan’s relationship to colonial markets. Abd al-Rahman’s agenda of fiscal reorientation toward India, and through it global capitalism, carried significant domestic consequences. In this crucial period, new routines in Afghanistan’s dealings with the outer world were established, and new bureaucratic structures and state practices were institutionalized. During Abd al-Rahman’s colonially configured reign, Afghanistan assumed its structural position on the periphery of modern global capitalism.

For chronological clarity, a list of Durrani rulers mentioned in this book appears below, although dates of reign for a given dynast can also be found in the text:

This print edition of Connecting Histories in Afghanistan published by Stanford University Press follows the electronic publication of the book by Columbia University Press through the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg-e Program. A number of minor corrections and additions to the electronic text have been made for this print version, but an effort was made to keep the electronic and printed version of the text as parallel as possible. The Gutenberg-e version of Connecting Histories is a unique repository for images (http://www. gutenberg-e.org/hanifi/gallery.html), a number of which (the maps, documents and coins) have magnification features not possible to reproduce in print form.

PART I

Colonial Market Knowledge and Commercial Experimentation

Introduction: The Historical Location and Conceptual Framing of Afghanistan

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.

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.

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 producers and the elite classes in Afghanistan came at interest rates that could quickly generate stultifying debt. The ability to provision large sums of cash on relatively short notice will be described in the context of the first British occupation of Kabul. The already profitable position enjoyed by the Hindki merchants in Afghanistan was considerably advanced as a result of the first Anglo-Afghan war. However, their collective position was dramatically eroded during Abd al-Rahman’s reign. As part of a larger agenda of state monopolization of the export economy, Abd al-Rahman attempted to replace these private Indian entrepreneurs with a corps of Afghan state commercial agents. The Hindki financiers were able to thin the debt accrued in Afghanistan throughout their vast trans-Eurasian commercial networks. Abd al-Rahman’s large-scale replacement of private Hindki financiers operating in Afghanistan with his own Afghan state officials and resources led to an increasing accumulation and concentration of national debt in Kabul. This policy also resulted in an elaboration of Kabul’s commercial relationship with Peshawar that came under formal British East India Company rule with the colonial creation of the Punjab Province in 1849.

The routinization of political relations between British India and Abd al-Rahman beginning in 1880 revolved around the cash subsidies liberally dispensed by colonial authorities to the Afghan Amir. The subsidy funds were in many instances recycled back into British Indian and European hands through Abd al-Rahman’s purchase of heavy industrial equipment and hire of technical expertise for his most consequential initiative, the mashin khana, a Persian compound literally translated as machine house, meaning in practice the Durrani state industrial workshops. In Western languages, Abd al-Rahman has been dubbed the Iron Amir, by popular and professional historians alike, in large measure as a result of his industrial approach to the military that gave the state’s troops tactical advantages, at least temporarily, in executing his notoriously brutal mechanisms of rule. Colonial funding and connections gave Abd al-Rahman these means and energy. Arguably the most consequential European import made possible by the subsidy was the industrial minting machinery that arrived in Kabul in 1890. Qandahar and its commercial relationship to Kabul were particularly affected by the arrival of this new modern industrial technology.

Qandahar was the scene of a curious incident during the first British occupation fifty years earlier. In this episode, ordinary colonial foot soldiers nearly rebelled when faced with unfavorable terms for a currency exchange that was nearly forced on them by their military superiors. The revolt was averted, but its threat was predicated on