Inter -regional trade and colonial state formation in nineteenth-century Afghanistan.

Abstract

The thematic organization and volume of data in this thesis set it methodologically apart from existing treatments of the colonial encounter in nineteenth-century Afghanistan. Data from South Asian archives illuminates the interaction between three ranges of variables within Anglo-Durrani state-formation. Each set of fluid relations is analyzed independently, but the overall narrative treats them collectively as a multi-tiered, dynamic field of interaction. The three interrelating layers are Durrani state and British Indian officials, private commercial groups including Indian bankers and Afghan nomads, and commodities such as fruit, salt, sugar, tea, timber, and, especially, money and literacy. Stages and forms of communication within and between the states and mercantile communities are addressed with reference to transformations in the exchange and circulation of commodities. Relations between Durrani rulers and colonial authorities are viewed through flows of various commodities between them. Money is key here, particularly the circulation and interaction of British Indian and Kabul rupees. This monetary engagement illustrates the dependence and subordination of the Durrani state and its currency to colonial India and the coinage that defined it. Paper money bills of exchange (<italic>hundis</italic>) produced and circulated by ubiquitous Indian bankers are examined in the context of credit provisioning and debt servicing transactions involving local bankers, the inter-regional trade networks they helped form, Afghan society-at-large, and the Durrani state. Literacy receives extended treatment, and accounting or numeric literacy is distinguished from textual literacy. Durrani financial records are the primary site for examining economic and social consequences of accounting literacy. Textual literacy is explored through the increased reliance on writing and writers that transformed the Durrani bureaucracy and therefore state-society relations in Afghanistan. Pashto-speaking Afghan nomads used written Persian to communicate with states and other mercantile communities and were particularly affected by the new Durrani documentary regime. Through a variety of passes, vouchers, and certificates, the nomads were textually coerced to alter their traditional routing and transport of commodities. These commodities, for example fruit, came to be documentarily construed as Durrani state property. In this way Durrani state writing reformatted the nomads' social communication and commodity exchanges with commercial brokers and other mercantile groups who were engaged locally and inter-regionally during the nomads' long-distance, seasonal marketing migrations between Central and South Asia.