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AFGHANISTAN Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation, by Robert D. Crews. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 381 pages. $29.95.
Reviewed by Robert Nichols
Robert Crews has made a major contribution to the writing of the history of Afghanistan, using a wide range of sources to situate the country's past within the wider transnational flows of early modern and modern world history. Those teaching a course on Afghanistan, Central Asia, or globalization should seriously consider this volume for use.
For a century, Americans writing about Afghanistan for Western readers have concentrated on political competition and conflict while drawing upon a literary portfolio of reductive colonial and civilizational tropes. To one 1925 writer, the "forbidden," "hermit kingdom" of a barbarian, vice-ridden, fanatical people literally had no history. After recycling familiar Rudyard Kipling verse, he still needed prose to fill out a breathless travelogue of a 1922 automobile drive from Peshawar to Kabul to interview Emir (later King) Amanullah and film newsreel footage. Lowell Thomas, the popular journalist, searched libraries in British India, England, and the United States. He concluded, "It is curious that there is no history of Afghanistan in print." Though a "buffer" between Russian and British empires, "not even a satisfactory historical description of it has yet been written."1
After September 2001, American and Western observers would reference Sir William Elphinstone and other British colonial sources on Afghan society and history. Yet only rarely did they search beyond English1. language texts, and their narratives conformed to familiar analyses that...