Deflecting Colonial Canons and Cannons: Alternate Routes to Knowing Afghanistan

The windfall reaped by the Sethi family through their intimate commercial connections with Abdur Rahman stands in stark contrast to the more usual experience of mercantile flight from and avoidance of Afghanistan. Abdur Rahman temporarily reversed the trend of Indian capital's penetration of Afghanistan, but he could not eliminate the dependence of Afghanistan's exports on India's mass consumer markets. Geography is the primary structuring variable in the long term economic connection between Afghanistan and India, and state politics are important determinants in the precise articulation of this commercial relationship between two unequal but interdependent economic zones. Interactive social and cultural histories blend geographical constants and political fluctuations into a multidimensional holograph of market life on the frontier between Afghanistan and India. This book explored a limited set of market relationships on this frontier during the nineteenth century when colonialism was globally ascendant.

2The lens of colonialism can be adjusted, however problematically, to accommodate both macroscopic and microscopic vantage points. The oeuvres of Chris Bayly and Bernard Cohn, respectively, capture those two complimentary scopes of colonial analysis, and that argument is made stronger because each author recognizes and engages the opposite "polarity" to make their own points and positions more potent through dialogue and flexibility.1 This two-tiered vision of what can be called the local and the global is at the same time an integrated one, and as such it is perhaps the primary connection at work in the preceding pages. Other connections that are equally basic, and similarly complex in their dialectics, have been necessary to consider in order to approximate what really happened on the ground and not what is imagined to have occurred from distant vantage points during the articulation of modern Afghanistan. Colonial connections between Afghanistan and British India were addressed through relations between states and markets in their own right and in relation to one another, social communities and commodity groups independently and interactively, and through texts and money again as multifaceted but singular units of analysis as well as an analytical pairing. It has been necessary to do a bit of disentangling along the way toward making social and economic connections between states, markets, people, money, and texts. This feature of the analysis highlighted important elements of distinction, on the one hand, and continuity, on the other, which were occurring within and in many ways articulating the larger and smaller colonial connections just described.

3The connections between colonialism and capitalism are metaphorically electric and can be viewed as productively synergetic, but those same connections can also be simultaneously and literally explosive and destructive. Capitalism and colonialism each have their own conceptual turf, but when combined those two rich fields of inquiry yield a fertile terrain to cultivate a study of Afghanistan.

4Fernand Braudel's historical analysis of capitalism tracks between the micro-local and macro-global levels and has arguably yet to be surpassed. The nomadic trading tribes who were central in the foregoing analysis capture the distinctions and links between what appear in Braudel's scheme as material life and market activity, the former geared toward basic subsistence and existence, the latter involving "surplus" goods and their exchange. For Braudel capitalism arises out of market activity and generates connections between formerly unintegrated markets. The agents of those connections and the agency employed to make them correspond in many important ways to the mobile Hindkis and hundis that paired with the commercially precocious nomads to form the fluid base over which political authorities must raft and camp rather than permanently settle. Braudel's view of complementary geographic, fiscal, and social variables facilitates an understanding of the imbalanced market relationships between Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar. His insights about market "pulls" and polarities magnify the colonial data used here, allowing us to see distinctions and interactions between those three market settings. His global model prompts a view of our three seemingly geographically marginal markets as much more central to the functioning of larger, again separate but interactive interregional and global commercial networks.

5Braudel is also a beacon for those lost at sea when trying to navigate toward an understanding of how large-scale debt is accrued and circulated, its roles in the genesis and demise of market and political structures, and its perpetual impact on ordinary debtor folk who are not fully aware of all the variables conspiring to undermine their relative fiscal buoyancy. Braudel demarcates debt through the interactions of commodities, cash currencies, and bookkeeping practices. His consideration of financial texts and accounting practices is amplified by Jack Goody who conveys the basic importance of literacy for bureaucracy and therefore in a more complicated way for governance. While attending to literacy's state locus, Goody also demonstrates that scribal groups and textual practices transcend cultural and political barriers. Together, Braudel and Goody illuminate the cavernous debt associated with Afghanistan and help to conceptually substantiate the data-driven arguments about debt presented in this book. Among the conclusions reached here are that the origins of Afghanistan's current poverty are found in state policies and practices, the articulation of Afghanistan's debt burden transpires via state paperwork handled by certain scribal and bureaucratic classes, and that ordinary consumers experienced this state-created and state-managed debt via the marketplace where Afghan state currency was increasingly less favored and devalued in relation to surrounding exponentially stronger state monies.

6Capitalism's advance often signals the emergence of "new" social groups and the transformation of "old" social relations, but this does not mean that before capitalism time stood still for "traditional" societies who lacked a familiar form of history. Eric Wolf highlights how capitalism produces new global migrations of laboring classes associated with new production regimes and circulations of old commodities. Arjun Appadurai sees tension between consumers and state authorities emerging from new commodity flows and finds those conducting the new commercial movements to have a distinct form of knowledge transcending single market settings to geographically span full commodity trajectories from points of production to consumption. Appardurai identifies an important distinction between customary and diversionary commodity paths, the latter involving a larger reconfiguration of social and political relations along the way. For Appadurai and Wolf, global historical change is propelled by these new circulations and movements of certain key marketers, laborers, and commodities. In the markets of Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar these two authors allow us to see that the emergence of a far more robust bureaucracy signaled a new state fiscal regime that transformed labor and commodity traffic patterns and revised social and political relations in and between the three locales.

7Within the vast rubrics of colonialism and capitalism we have been striving for a way to manage fundamental but fundamentally complicated relationships that constitute human economic strategies, as well as other complex associations such as those between the ideological constructions of political space and the material realities and inequalities that uncooperatively represent and belie so-often hasty reasonings about Afghanistan and everything it involves. These independent but integrated explorations of capitalism and colonialism have involved histories of populations within, on the borders of, "passing through," and at varying distances outside of the territory in question. What we have been searching for is the political economy of a permeable zone characterized by multiple kinds of barriers and crossings. In other words, we have had to reckon with, on one hand boundaries, borders, and frontiers, and, on the other hand, interregional, indeed global exchange networks, trans-Eurasian commodity and cultural circuits and patterned migrations transgressing the limits of the analytical units being deployed.