As much it becomes exciting to unearth new evidence for inquiry of a historical problem and/or offer a new interpretation of old ones, it equally becomes a task to accomplish it when one notes peculiar vocabularies, problems, and meanings in their conceptual and archival evidence. It has often been a serendipity in my historical and ethnographic inquiries to note, often curiously, how and in what contexts a certain word or phrase conveys a unique historical and literal meaning.

Take the modern English term “crate” written in Pashto and Dari languages. People from fruit-producing districts in Shamally Plains, the fertile region north of Kabul, sometimes use crate as a variable weight unit, like one large commercial crate of fresh grapes equals 14 kilos, and sometimes as a popular synonym for other well-known English terms in everyday vernacular in Afghanistan, such as baks for box, kāntinar for container, and pakij for package.Footnote ¹ It is extraordinary that one could rarely hear Afghans using Pashto and/or the more common Persian alternatives to these terms.Footnote ² Similarly, a term like “mestarī,” from the old Swedish mästare or “master at a profession,” means exclusively a “car mechanic” in everyday society in Afghanistan today. When mestari was first introduced to the country in the late nineteenth century, it conveyed a hierarchical occupation, referring specifically to the “[Indian] subcontracted assistants to the British mechanics and engineers employed at the mashin khana (industrial workshops) by Abd al-Rahman” (pp. 117–19). Historically, these terms and hundreds of other English lexes common in various Afghan spoken and written vernaculars indicate, on the one hand, Afghanistan’s everyday living with its modern global past, and indeed its enduring relations with the intellectual, economic, and political forces of capitalism, colonialism, and the world economy in general. On the other hand, despite their historical and literary value, they are, alas, yet to be given any due attention in the nascent field of Afghanistan studies.

Are “crate” and “mestari” colonial legacies in Afghanistan? While it depends on how one understands “colonialism” in regional and global histories, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi may reply ‘yes’ to this question. However, what Hanifi offers in Connecting Histories in Afghanistan is a much more straightforward study than this epistemic question of what is colonial in Afghanistan. Indeed, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan is a revisionist work against what Hanifi terms the Kabul Hypothesis, a colonially “constructed” (p. xv) episteme in which Afghanistan’s historical connections to capitalism and British Indian colonialism during the nineteenth century are obscured and ignored in traditional understanding of the country, often in favor of militaristic and functionalist interpretation schemes. The central objective seems to be also for Hanifi no less than to propose a stem-to-stern epistemic review of Afghanistan’s colonial pasts, with a goal ultimately to revise and reorient the conclusion that colonialism did not affect “Afghanistan” as Afghan people were immune to it because of the historical “failures” of the British Indian colonial armies and their two “defeats” at the hands of Afghans.

Openly expressing a distrust of this “master narrative” (p. 29), Hanifi takes capitalism and colonialism as a combined historical context by arguing that Afghanistan is actually a colonial construction of British Indian colonialism. Reading against the grain a diverse body of hitherto unstudied textual materials from several national and provincial colonial archives across South Asia (Peshawar, Lahore, and New Delhi, to name a few), Hanifi identifies three different periods of British Indian colonialism in nineteenth-century Afghanistan: “experimental” (1809–42); “interim” (1842–78); and “routinized” (1880–1901). In Part One (chapters 1–3), Hanifi argues that the British Indian colonial authorities saw economic opportunities, such as the “lucrative trade” (p. 33) in fruit and other commodities between India, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, to be extractive and profitable. As such, they instigated a variety of colonially knowledge-based commercial experimentation projects ranging from engaging with major local and regional commercial communities to contracting directly for trade, financing, and transportation purposes various Afghan-Pashtun-Pathan nomadic trading tribes (Lohanis, Pawendas, etc.), Indian financial banking communities (Hindkis), especially those operating in and beyond Peshawar, Kabul, and Qandahar, three principal cities under examination. It is useful to note that two other important different works—Benjamin Hopkins’ The Making of Modern Afghanistan (2008) and Martin Bayly’s Taming The Imperial Imagination (2016)—also offer a new understanding of the British Indian colonialism in nineteenth-century Afghanistan. They specifically maintain that contemporary political and intellectual realities, not commercial, were the aims of the British Indian colonial authorities when dealing with Afghanistan during this early formative period, and later.

Hanifi, however, argues that the early colonial experimentation projects—as means and/or ends to colonialism—along with colonial interventions during the first British occupation of Afghanistan in the working of precolonial commercial, financial, and accounting regimes like “reformation” of the Durrani state revenue structures, were at their best exploitative, and were historically devastating. They culminated not only with the first Anglo-Afghan war and annihilation of the British Indus army, but also the vengeful destruction of several marketplaces and towns (e.g. Kabul historic bazaar) by a British army of retribution, and a “severe” (p. 85) setback to local economies, such as those of Koh Daman, Istalif, and Arghandeh. Hanifi proposes that after the first war there was however a temporary interruption in Anglo-Afghan relations during 1842 and 1878, when British colonial authorities kept “restricted contact” (p. 100) with Afghanistan. This is evident, according to Hanifi, in poor documentation of the period by colonial ink compared to rich colonial archives from the preceding and subsequent periods. Hanifi appreciates that this “interim” period was “an active one” (p. xvi) at both local and global levels, but one could wish to know whether other sources, such as Afghan, Iranian, and Russian Central Asian materials from the same period, could fill the gap in the British colonial archives, which Hanifi unpacks in a very skillful manner.

Part Two (chapters 4–6) focuses on the third period of British Indian colonialism between the years 1880 and 1901. According to Hanifi, Anglo-Afghan relations become “routinized” in the aftermath of the second British Indian occupation of Afghanistan in 1878, and after the colonial affirmation of the Barakzai prince Abd al-Rahman Khan (r. 1880–1901) as British Indian coveted ruler in Kabul. Hanifi explores several “new outdated colonial economy” processes from this period. Firstly, he maintains that British colonial authorities expanded their traditional colonial policy of funding Durrani rulers in Kabul. They increased Abd al-Rahman’s subsidy payments into “regularized and predictable dispersals” (p. 102) for his agreement to a number of British Indian treaty conditions, including agreeing to the two main colonial elements of the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak—which conducted Afghanistan’s foreign affairs through the British colonial eyes in India, and accepted the appointment of a permanent colonial agent in Kabul—and his consent to the 1893 Durand agreement, resulting in pronouncement of Durand Line as a permanent border between the British Indian Empire and Afghanistan. However, Hanifi’s main argument here is that colonial money was indispensable to Abd al-Rahman’s personal and institutional state agendas.

For example, Hanifi aggregates that towards the second half of his reign Abd al-Rahman received yearly in British Indian rupees a total of “eighteen lakhs” stipend (p. 102). He redistributed it at liberty in order to restructure the economics of the Afghan state, including appointing and controlling personally all his financial and commercial agents such as trade representatives, postmasters, caravan officials, etc. Abd al-Rahman’s men, stationed at colonial cities like Peshawar and Bombay, were instrumental in the redistribution of subsidy in multiple ways, including but not limited to rechanneling of colonial money out of Afghanistan for purchasing and importing to Kabul English manufactured military commodities and machines (e.g. iron, steel, cannons, etc.), raw materials (e.g. copper), and different European luxury items (e.g. looking glasses), mostly for the purposes of building Kabul industrial workshops, and courtly ceremonial and elite consumption.

Hanifi further argues that in addition to colonial money Abd al-Rahman relied on various strategies and technologies of governance and capital accumulation with and without direct communication and coordination with the British Indian colonial officials. He implemented diverse auditing mechanisms and account books between Kabul and provinces like Qandahar, initiated private and government price schemes, introduced new state documents and documentation practices, and other institutional and human enterprises. Hanifi provides many detailed examples here, such as Abd al-Rahman’s deliberate declaration of all financial and commercial state documents issued before him as void (p. 126); a butter seller in Qandahar was provided with papers to pen intelligence directly to him (p. 126); and or state brokers were directed to revenue farming, and or secure him a monopoly in the lucrative fruit trade by both participating in it and collecting brokerage and other types of fees from it (p. 130). Hanifi argues that the immediate effects of these colonially funded state industrial, commercial, and textual “terror” (p. 123), brought about by Abd al-Rahman to commercial communities (Hindkis), trading tribes (the kuchis), and business families (the Sethis of Peshawar), were consequential to them, and to Afghanistan as a whole. The commercial communities were forced to change their old routes, roles, and operations in Afghanistan as Abd al-Rahman advanced his policies of state centralization and commercial monopoly, while the country itself was “restricted” from entering the global economy. Actually, Hanifi’s principal point here is to argue that in the long term, these colonial experiences of Afghanistan, particularly under Abd al-Rahman, set the foundation for the contemporary impoverishment of the country.

Not all readers of Connecting Histories in Afghanistan may agree with this concluding statement, and indeed other arguments Hanifi makes. They may point to the human and institutional limits of the British Indian Empire as a historical mode of production and governance in South Asia. As such, whether one points to Hanifi’s analytical sidelining of the imperfection of capitalism and colonialism, the limits of British Indian colonialism in Afghanistan, and or the important usefulness of non-colonial materials as a whole as methodological shortcomings of Connecting Histories in Afghanistan, it requires further dialogues on both the specific historical arguments and epistemic contours Hanifi so farsightedly charts in the studying of modern Afghanistan. Indeed, as this review was started by underlining historically the everyday synthesis of historical and occupational English terms like crate and mestari in Afghanistan, it is useful to conclude with a couple of more food-for-thought markers.

Firstly, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan, like other important works in the global academy on Afghanistan, remains largely inaccessible to students and scholars inside Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, a review of it appears in the Journal of Iranian Studies almost ten years after its print edition. The seeds of Connecting Histories in Afghanistan were originally laid twenty years ago in Hanifi’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan under the direction of the eminent Middle East and South Asia scholar Juan Cole, which also won the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg-e prize in 2004. Secondly, in addition to Afghanists, other scholars and students of capitalism and colonialism, especially of British Empire, South Asia studies, and readers from other fields, including globalization, political economy, and business history, can usefully benefit from it. Last but not least, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan is written in a highly conceptual and detailed language in a total of 270 pages. In addition to a long introduction, a short conclusion, and six core analysis chapters, a good number of new satellite-taken and historical maps, images, and examples of colonial primary source documents as well as a valuable appendix in English, Pashto, and Persian commercial vocabulary in nineteenth-century Afghanistan plus a rich index, appear in the current edition.