St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies 55 СЕКЦИЯ 3 Общее и особенное в регионах Афганистана и трансграничных регионах афганской культурно-лингвистической ойкумены PANEL THREE The General and the Specific in the Regions of Afghanistan and in the Liminal Areas of the Afghan Linguistic and Cultural Oecumene Magnus Marsden (Sussex Asia Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK) Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers For centuries, the territory and peoples that currently make up Afghanistan have played a major role in regional and long distance trade. ‘Afghans’ have acted in influential ways as middlemen traders connecting different regional markets to one another, and they have also hosted, facilitated, and profited from the work of other communities of merchants and also of trade diasporas involved in the trade between South and Central Asia. Generations of merchants and itinerant traders have crossed Afghanistan’s valleys and mountain passes, transporting and dealing in goods ranging from dried fruits to emeralds and carpets to guns. These merchants have delivered products to the plains and coastal littorals of South Asia, the bazaars of the great Islamicate cities of Central Asia, Bukhara, and Samarqand, the trade fairs of Russia, as well as to Chinese cities, such as the capital of the T’ang dynasty, Xi’an. In spite of trade’s significance to their region’s history, however, Afghans are popularly represented as belonging to ‘tribes’, subscribing to static ‘honour codes’, and as tenaciously clinging on to archaic tribal values. Many of the Afghan traders with whom I work are aware that such images of ‘the Afghan’ exist. They emphasise, instead, the importance to their everyday lives of mobility, flexibility, and a willingness to engage in risk-taking ventures. This set of aptitudes and those who most clearly embody them—traders and merchants—have largely failed to receive scholarly attention: traders are the focus of sustained research, especially for projects