An Outline Spatial History of Afghanistan
David Ludden, NYU
11 August 2019
Struggles of many kinds have raged for centuries over control of territories enclosed by the national map of Afghanistan. Standard histories of that legacy focus on great power efforts to sustain central state authority — from Ghaznavids, Timurids and Safavids to the Great Game, Cold War, and today, imperial America – and thus they conceal the dynamic complexity of the historical space in which everyday people have produced Afghanistan’s fractured coherence.
Scholars call that space Indo-Persia. It is composed of influentially interconnected historical regions spanning what are now Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Those regions include Khorasan, Transoxiana/Mawara-un-Nahr, Badakshan, Wakhan, Baltistan, Kashmir, Panjab, Kabul, Sistan, Makran, Sindh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi, Awadh, Bihar, Deccan, and Bengal. Major cities include Nishapur, Mashhad, Marv, Herat, Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, Balkh/Mazari Sharif, Kabul, Kandahar, Srinagar, Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Surat, Patna, Hyderabad, and Dhaka.
The Persianate qualities of Indo-Persia appear in its intricate cultural heritage, in its languages, literatures, arts, customs, religions, aesthetics, and genealogies. Its Indian qualities appear in the trajectory of its social expansion, over many centuries, from routes connecting the Steppe with Persia, moving south and east, into Indian monsoon spaces, where summer rains feed rice and wheat and winter winds carry ships to ports in Sindh and Gujarat.
Many centuries of travel, migration, and settlement made Indo-Persia a vast human land bridge connecting the Steppe and the Indian Ocean. Indo-Persia thus became a generative space of mobility and territorial contestation in Asia’s very long process of globalization, which began two millennia before Vasco da Gama arrived, in 1498. After that, Europeans increased global connectivity with mobility at sea, but before, during, and after, Asia’s expansive globalization travelled around The Steppe and the Indian Ocean through Persia, India, and China.
Around The Steppe, horse warrior nomads and merchants propelled globalization from prehistoric times: Indo-Aryans, Turks, Mongols, Sogdians, Armenians, and many others. Around the Indian Ocean, merchants and sailors connected distant shores, riding monsoon winds: Greeks, Africans, Arabs, Gujaratis, Tamils, Chinese, Bugis, and many others. All the agents of globalization travelled through Persia, India, and China, where they joined countless local investors in the imperial economic development of agriculture, trade, and manufacturing, which drew upon and accelerated connectivity across Central Asia and around southern seas. All great imperial territories in Asia developed in connective spaces between The Steppe and The Sea.
That spatial pattern of development entailed continuous movement of population, culture, and imperial power from north to south, out of the dry Steppe into fertile Persia, India, and China. Warriors from The Steppe built all the great Asian empires, but in different ways. In China and Persia, Steppe warrior horse nomads rode straight into the plains and a strict cultural opposition developed between peoples of The Steppe and The Sown. By contrast, Indo-Persia includes thousands of miles of Hindu Kush pathways connecting South Asia with The Steppe and Khorasan. Those mountains served as a capillary filter for millions of people who travelled in all directions: many died along the way, as did Alexander the Great’s exhausted troops, but many people settled down to work the land, raise animals, and pursue mercantile and military careers designed specifically for these mountainous spaces of mobility.
Afghanistan took shape in those spaces, where militant settlers took control of local land and fought to control routes of travel. This produced a distinctive territorial politics dispersed among valleys woven together in a maze of routes through the mountains. Controlling those routes became increasingly profitable with increasing trade and by the end of the first millennium CE, military conflict over routes through the Hindu Kush had spilled into the plains. Ever since, imperial powers based in the plains have sought military control over those capillaries of trade connecting The Steppe and The Sea.
The cultural content of these capillary spaces changed as patterns of migration shifted in the eighth century. Until then, migratory settlers were mostly Indo-Aryan language speakers: Vedic Aryans, Kushans, Sakas, Indo-Greeks, and others. Buddhists, Hindus, and Zoroastrians were prominent. Monks and merchants from India and China travelled the mountains and the Silk Road thrived. A great shift occurred after 700, when Turkic horse nomads riding west from Mongolia, Arabs riding east from Syria, and Persians riding out of Khorasan combined to extend Abbasid imperial territory from Syria to Samarkand. Thereafter, Turkic language speakers became most prominent as Indo-Persia’s migrant settlers, increasingly mixing Turkic, Persian, and Mongol cultural qualities.
Migrations after 751 produced tribal identities and territories called “Afghan,” inside ever-more active, valuable pathways through the Hindu Kush. The year 751 is iconic because it was then that Turks, Persians, and Arabs fought under Abbasids to defeat T’ang forces at the Talas River (between Tashkent and Bishkek), forcing imperial China to withdraw permanently east of the Pamirs. Paper-making then spread through Abbasid territory and Islam travelled with Turks and with increasing Sufi influence all across Indo-Persia. Balkh eventually became Mazari Sharif. Afghan imperial territorialism began in 998, as Abbasid power declined and Mahmud of Ghazni formed marched through the mountains and into the lowlands across Persia and India. There followed a long series of imperial projects spanning Indo-Persia, running through Afghan territory; these reached the height of their institutional legitimacy under the Timurids.
The centrality of Indo-Persia for Asia’s economic development increased as the Abbasid Empire fell apart and further increased during and after Mongol imperial expansion, which drove many more migrants south into India, where – by 1300 –settlers from the Persianate north had produced Sufi silsilas and dynastic territories from Delhi to Bengal and Gujarat to Madurai. This increasing long-distance mobility through the Hindu Kush produced ever more profitable spaces for investment along all routes connecting The Steppe and The Sea.
Eighteenth century imperial struggles over Afghan territory reflect the increasing commercial and military value of routes through the Hindu Kush; these became more profitable bastions for diverse Afghan tribes pursuing control over local assets and also imperial targets for competing lowland rulers. That combination of local and imperial struggles for control over spaces of mobility steadily reduced the commercial value of long-distance trade through the Hindu Kush, which then became Afghanistan national state territory. China’s Belt-Road initiative is the most recent reiteration of Global Asia’s connective imperative to connect The Steppe and The Sea: the BRI route from Kashgar through the Indus Valley reflects another economic adaptation by people who invest in spaces of mobility to opportunities and obstacles produced by politics. Such adaptations are visible historically all across Asia from ancient times; now, they discourage long-distance mobility through Afghanistan and drive the national government to seek control over militant groups entrenched in ancient pathways.
Mountains and rivers provide the physical template for Afghanistan’s spatially fractured coherence. River valleys host major cities which have been sites for intense local investment for many centuries, situated at strategic points where hills meet the plains; thus, these cities ring the central massif and anchor routes into the lowlands in what are now respectively Iran, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan: Herat, Mazari Sharif, Kabul, Ghazna, and Kandahar. Ring roads around the central Hindu Kush massif connect these cities, and one major road cuts across to Kabul and Herat, reflecting old India-Persia routes, but the centrifugal trajectory of mobility into the lowlands combined with the localized mosaic of territorial control in the mountains makes fractured Afghan territorialism one obstinate legacy of many centuries of mobility across Indo-Persia.