Afghan State Formation to 1800

Abstract Historians tend to associate Afghan state formation with the reign of Ahmad Shah Durrani (r. 1747–1772)—the presumptive founder of Afghanistan. Yet the emphasis on Ahmad Shah and his establishment of the Durrani dynasty (1747–1973) as the origin point of Afghan state formation obscures the reality that Afghans have been involved in state-building processes across the Persianate lands of the eastern Islamic world for over a millennium. From their putative ancestral homeland (watan) in the mountainous region straddling the modern Afghanistan-Pakistan border, itinerant Afghans formed reputed trading and soldiering communities who regularly interacted with Persianate polities active in the Central Asia-South Asia corridor since the 10th century. Emerging out of the medieval Ghaznavid Empire (977–1186) and Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526, 1540–1555), two Afghan dynasties—the Lodis (1451–1526) and the Surs (1545–1555)—would rise to political prominence and forge states of their own in South Asia. The Lodi and Sur ruling dispensations persisted until the opening decades of the 16th century, when the nascent Mughal Empire of India (1526–1858) halted their state building projects. However, Afghan rule would reemerge with renewed vigor in the early 18th century, coinciding with the waning political authority of the Mughals in India and their Safavid counterparts in Iran (1501–1722). Prominent among the Afghan polities that sprang up across Iran and India in the post-Safavid and late-Mughal milieus was the Durrani state centered in Qandahar (established 1747) and the contemporaneous principalities of the Rohilla and Bangash Afghans based in the Yamuna-Ganga interfluve, or doab, east of Delhi (fl. mid-18th century). Cultural, economic, religious, and political synergies between the Durrani, Rohilla, and Bangash Afghans helped produce a prosperous Indo-Afghan empire that connected the eastern Iranian province of Khurasan, the cis-Oxus Central Asian territory of Turkistan, and the north Indian region of Hindustan. The Indo-Afghan empire thrived until a series of internal economic and political crises occasioned its fragmentation by the end of the 18th century. This crisis of Afghan empire only deepened as a result of external pressures exerted by colonial Britain and also by Russia in the later Durrani context, which profoundly shaped the trajectory of Afghan state formation leading into the 19th century.

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