Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation

by Robert D. Crews

Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a country frozen in time and forsaken by the world. Afghan Modern presents a bold challenge to these misperceptions, revealing how Afghans, over the course of their history, have engaged and connected with a wider world and come to share in our modern globalized age.

Always a mobile people, Afghan travelers, traders, pilgrims, scholars, and artists have ventured abroad for centuries, their cosmopolitan sensibilities providing a compass for navigating a constantly changing world. Robert Crews traces the roots of Afghan globalism to the early modern period, when, as the subjects of sprawling empires, the residents of Kabul, Kandahar, and other urban centers forged linkages with far-flung imperial centers throughout the Middle East and Asia. Focusing on the emergence of an Afghan state out of this imperial milieu, he shows how Afghan nation-making was part of a series of global processes, refuting the usual portrayal of Afghans as pawns in the “Great Game” of European powers and of Afghanistan as a “hermit kingdom.”

In the twentieth century, the pace of Afghan interaction with the rest of the world dramatically increased, and many Afghan men and women came to see themselves at the center of ideological struggles that spanned the globe. Through revolution, war, and foreign occupations, Afghanistan became even more enmeshed in the global circulation of modern politics, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the tumultuous decades that followed.

Genres: History, Middle East, Nonfiction

330 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2015

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's impossible to write a comprehensive general history of a country or a people in just 300 pages. But Crews succeeds in outlining the grand trends of modern and pre-modern Afghan history. Growing up during the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I was accustomed to images and descriptions of the Afghans that characterized them as primitive, dirty, traditional Islamic fundamentalists. The propaganda that Americans were subjected to during those wars by the military and the media continues to dominate how Americans view Afghans and people from the Middle East in general. While I knew that the stereotypes couldn't be true, I was relatively in the dark about Afghan history, and I only recently learned about the socialist/nativist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan of the 1980s.

Crews' thorough work was a primary-source packed run through 300 years. This is the book to give to the bigots and the Trump fans that you know who call Muslims "towel-heads." They'll be shocked to learn about the centuries of trade that enriched Afghanistan, the triumph of the Durrani empire that stretched from Pakistan into Iran, the sketchy Westerners, and the history of mass "modernization" and development projects. To Americans who have seen Afghanistan only through the skewed lens of the officially sanctioned accounts during our 15 year war, Crews' book will be a wake-up call.

At the same time, he glosses over the many complicated regime changes, leading to some confusing passages where the reader forgets who's in charge and why. Crews also uses too many block quotes from only marginally interesting or relevant sources, which detract from the overall excellence of the book. In my opinion, Crews often picked the wrong anecdotes and wasted space that could have been better used to delve deeper into inter-ethnic and gender relations.

The Afghans are a truly global people and may play a defining role in the future politics of the Middle East. Tired of war, the several million migrants who have fled the country since the Soviet invasion will hopefully come back to rebuild their country in the coming decades. If resilience has anything to do with national success, my money is on the Afghans.

[Ajk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago, he told me how ridiculous the whole "transnational turn" in history is. Of course we know that individuals have crossed national boundaries across the centuries. Of course we know that this has affected both the country they left and the country they arrived in. But because of the vertical nature of national archives, we are only know getting to the point where we can assemble this transnationalim. And most of what we're learning is — "no duh."

Crews' but goes beyond that, and not just because its Afghanistan he's focusing on. Afghan Modern has a central tension in how Afghanism is defined — by a diaspora or by the central state. There's no straightforward answer, mostly because of the wild changes in definitions of both the diaspora and state over the centuries. By focusing on the "modern" aspect of the Afghan nation (words that could be problematic in other contexts, but are well-owned here) he gives a frame for this tension that goes well beyond "no duh."

So it's really interesting! It would be really easy to go for the "can you believe that an Afghan dude was central in labor organizing in Oakland in the early 1900s?", but by putting that dude in context and showing how he and people like him affected Afghanistan-the-state, Crews goes well beyond what he had to do. And by refusing to shy away from post-2001 Afghanistan — or worse, trying to explain it — Crews shows how contemporary imaginings of the state are not just misunderstandings but flawed reasoning.

It's a really great book, not just for understanding Afghanistan but also for understanding the concept of modernity and the flaws of a nation-state understanding of history.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

To date, the best overview of Afghan history I've read. Crews writes an outstanding global history of a cosmopolitan Afghan people, eschewing the narrative of "the graveyard of empires," and relegating this rhetoric to the annals of history where it rightfully belongs. Should you be at all interested in a modern survey of Afghanistan, roughly mid-19th C to present, do give this a try.