The Making of Modern Afghanistan

by Hopkins, B. D.

• ISBN13: 9780230302372
• ISBN10: 0230302378
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Examines the evolution of the modern Afghan state in the shadow of Britain's imperial presence in South Asia during the first half of the nineteenth century, and challenges the staid assumptions that the Afghans were little more than pawns in a larger Anglo-Russian imperial rivalry known as the 'Great Game'.

Author Biography

B.D. Hopkins is Assistant Professor of History and international Affairs at the George Washington University, USA. His work focuses on modern South Asian history, in particular that Afghanistan and the north-west frontier during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also co-author (with Magnus Marsden) of Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, as well as numerous journal articles.

Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. viii
List of Maps	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Afghanistan imagined	p. 1
Situating Afghanistan	p. 2
The argument	p. 6
The Power of Colonial Knowledge	p. 11
Introduction	p. 11
British imaginings	p. 13
Elphinstone's legacy	p. 23
Conclusion	p. 32
The Myth of the 'Great Game'	p. 34
Introduction	p. 34
The 'Great Game'	p. 35
The Indus Scheme	p. 47
British policy west of the Indus	p. 50
Conclusion	p. 59
Anglo-Sikh Relations and South Asian Warfare	p. 61
Introduction	p. 61
The failure of British strategy	p. 62
The Punjab and the 'military labour market'	p. 70
The Afghan-Sikh conflict	p. 75
Conclusion	p. 78
Ontology of the Afghan Political Community	p. 82
Introduction	p. 82
The contours of Afghanistan's social ecology	p. 84
A tribal kingdom: The evolution of the Afghan proto-state	p. 87
Afghanistan's plundering polity model	p. 90
Afghanistan's Islamic moral landscape	p. 98
'Royalism' in an egalitarian society	p. 102
Conclusion	p. 107
Camels, Caravans and Corridor Cities: The Afghan Economy	p. 110
Introduction	p. 110
The Afghan transit economy	p. 113
Exogenous factors affecting the Afghan economy	p. 123
Conclusion	p. 133
The Afghan Trade Corridor	p. 136
Introduction	p. 136
Typology of caravan corridor cities	p. 137
Corridor cities of Central Asian caravan commerce	p. 139
Conclusion	p. 159
Conclusion: The 'Failure' of the Afghan Political Project	p. 163
The creation of 'Afghanistan'	p. 163
The argument revisited	p. 165
Implications	p. 167
The colonial legacy	p. 170
Epilogue	p. 174
Notes	p. 177
Glossary of Foreign Terms	p. 229
Unpublished Sources	p. 231
Bibliography	p. 234
Index	p. 250
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.