Increased access to archival and other textual sources and the situating of “Afghan” history within wider theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary thinking have opened Afghanistan-related studies to new fields of research and analysis. This offers new opportunities to reimagine and move beyond established historical narratives and preoccupations. At a point when English-language archives have been comprehensively mined for the political histories of Afghan dynasties, intruding Western empires, and the dynamics of modernity and state-building, non-English-language primary-source material has become increasingly available, including in translation and in online digital archival formats. The recent English translation by M. Mehdi Khorrami and Robert D. McChesney of volume three of The History of Afghanistan by the Afghan Hazara historian Fayz Muhammad Katib (c. 1863–1931) offers new material with which to reconsider not only elite political careers but also ethnic identity and competition, the sociology of provincial political networks, and the creation of governing rules codified by ʿAbd al-Rahman and Habibullah.Footnote ¹

Christine Noelle-Karimi, in State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan, reminds us of other primary sources, including those relied upon by Fayz Muhammad, such as Imam al-Din Husayni's Tarikh-i Husayn Shahi, the Tarikh-i Sultani, and Iranian accounts. Such texts remain available for those exploring themes beyond political narrative. The online archive of printed books from Afghanistan from 1871 to 1930 on the Afghanistan Digital Library website maintained by New York University suggests not just a key location of available primary sources but also the method by which documents in scattered archives will in the future be made available to researchers.Footnote ²

Scholars will also range beyond much recent Afghan historiography, which has suffered a decade-long post-9/11 fixation on politics and war, producing narratives that have too often incorporated unexamined and recycled colonial-era tropes and stereotypes. Such historians might profitably follow the interdisciplinary lines of research and argument currently explored by innovative scholars of Afghan political science, anthropology, sociology, and women's studies, who have assembled new bibliographies and read deeply into nonhistorical sources to write about post-2001 Afghanistan. These new topics include social dynamics; Asian and Afghan networks of trade, exchange, and employment; gender relations and struggles; and the rebalancing of ethnic and community political relationships.Footnote ³ Such issues might be studied in historical context through the several hundred printed books, documents, and newspapers in the Afghanistan Digital Library. These often not only relate to political history but also concern literature, law, religion, and language.

Much remains to be done in the path of current scholars who have expanded notions of appropriate historical questions, sources, and archives. Recent work by Nile Green suggests the rewards available to those who search for Afghan-related sources written in Urdu, especially during the British colonial era, and for Afghan-related sources written in Persian in Iran in the 19th and 20th centuries.Footnote ⁴ Primary-source manuscripts and texts in “Afghan” languages, such as those available in the Pashto-language holdings of the Pashto Academy at the University of Peshawar (Pakistan) or in the Raza Library in Rampur (India), remain available for framing original research questions. These might explore social and subaltern histories; cultural histories based in regional languages and literatures; and the evolving histories of community identities challenged by nationalism, Islam, and globalization. Western scholars of Afghanistan should be mindful of and collaborate as much as possible with scholars located in the region, especially in Kabul and Peshawar, who have already researched local archives and sources and published in non-English-language publications.

In the last fifty years, historical thinking in the broader fields of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies has progressed beyond concerns with elite and state political histories in an evolving series of theoretically and methodologically innovative directions. Economic histories have traced communities and exchange across colonial and national boundaries. Social histories have examined class, status, and ethnic relations, including from subaltern-studies perspectives and methods. Efforts have increasingly been fully grounded in the languages and literatures of the regions being studied, including in research on women's and cultural histories. While Afghanistan scholarship has made tentative steps in these directions, much is left to do, especially regarding studies based in primary sources in Afghan languages and texts.

The essays in this roundtable offer a sense of the expanding sensibility of historical writing on Afghanistan. Some scholars may continue to revisit familiar questions and spatial and temporal frameworks, even as others recast periods and spaces of inquiry and insist on deploying methods and theories used profitably in other historiographies. In his contribution, Amin Tarzi argues that future scholarship will not neglect histories of the “imagined community” of the Afghan nation-state. Just as David Edwards has studied how Amir ʿAbd al-Rahman “mapped” his Afghan state in the 19th century, so scholars will continue to trace the 20th- and 21st-century projects of different Afghan governments self-defining “national” identities and narratives.Footnote ⁵ Future historians will spend many years interpreting the histories of the Taliban period; the post-2001 decade; the related regional histories of Kandahar, Kabul, and the north; and the roles therein of Pakistan, India, Iran, and America.

While emphasizing the need to recognize the dynamics both of regional, subnational relationships and of transnational connectivity and sources, Nile Green's roundtable essay makes clear that unbalanced interests in early and late 20th-century Afghan political history have neglected many questions about the middle decades of the century. This is particularly the case for the 1930s and 1940s, when Indian nationalism and the crisis in European empires and global/colonial economies had direct effects in Afghanistan. Existing diplomatic and political studies of Afghanistan and the wider region from the 1930s through the 1950s have left untouched many other, nonpolitical, questions of contemporary historical interest.

R. D. McChesney's essay also takes up the importance of studying transnational connections by reminding scholars to recognize histories of mobility. Afghan merchants, political exiles (including the historian Mir Gholam Mohammad Ghobar), and devotional seekers all traveled, both internally and abroad. Scholars have already illustrated that stories of particular communities and locations often reveal histories of transregional, and Afghan, social and economic dynamics.Footnote ⁶ Many such studies on Afghan communities and regions remain to be done, including on the north and west, in both Pashtun and non-Pashtun areas. These histories might profitably be written into the contemporary, post-2001 moment, when the circulation of people and commodities, including opium and currency, might be traced across Asia and the Middle East, including to real estate in Dubai.

Studies of Afghanistan are slowly including a range of theoretical and methodological approaches already deployed in the discussion of other world regions. In previous decades, Middle East and South Asia historians borrowed, adapted, and applied theory and themes from notable Western scholarship, pushing them to examine new questions and sources relevant to social, cultural, and nonelite histories. Whether or not Habermas and Foucault turn up in belated applications to Afghan topics, Afghan historiography has the opportunity to move beyond derivative parroting by drawing on theory and methods already effective in South Asian and Middle East studies. Theoretically innovative regional studies will encourage the pursuit of new questions, including through the study of less utilized sources. As suggested by James Caron's essay in this collection, creative thinking means that one need not search for proof of a common Afghan “subaltern” mentality in any particular time or place to consider subaltern studies methods, including the reading of official sources “against the grain” to gather historical evidence and insight.

Building on the range of possibilities discussed here, historians will continue the process of integrating historical thinking about Afghanistan. In doing so, they will need to draw on the full range of approaches, in theory and method, used by scholars around the world who seek both basic understanding and comparative insight. The history of the Afghan state will continue to be argued and revised. But the varied and dynamic histories of the Afghan people will increasingly emerge across a spectrum of studies located from the contingent to the enduring and the subnational to the transnational.