The Pearl of Pearls: The Abdālī-Durrānī Confederacy and Its Transformation under Aḥmad Shāh, Durr-i Durrān
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation traces the history of the Abdālī-Durrānī tribal confederacy from its putative origins to the career of arguably its most influential historical personality, Aḥmad Shāh Durr-i Durrān, the “Pearl of Pearls” (r. 1747–72). Drawing upon extensive research of primary sources on the topic such as tribal genealogies, court chronicles, local histories, and other documents, this study examines the process whereby the Abdālī-Durrānī evolved from a petty Afghan tribal confederacy active in Qandahar, a frontier region of the early modern empires of the Safavids and Mughals, to founders of the autonomous Durrānī empire that, at its height under Aḥmad Shāh, was one of the most powerful polities in Asia.\nDespite the considerable influence of the Abdālī-Durrānī, the crucial transitional period of the confederacy’s history, spanning roughly from 1550 to 1818, remains understudied. “The Pearl of Pearls” is aimed at better understanding this history by exploring neglected topics such as: the construction of the Afghan identity of the Abdālī- Durrānī; the nature of the confederacy’s interactions with the Safavid, Mughal, and Nādirid states; the gradual formation of the Durrānī state; the large-scale sedentarization of the Durrānī in the reign of Aḥmad Shāh and his successors; and the accompanying Persian acculturation of the tribal confederacy’s ruling elite. While directed primarily towards supplementing our limited knowledge of the Abdālī-Durrānī and the early modern Durrānī state, this dissertation also considers the enduring legacies of Aḥmad Shāh’s rule in relation to the modern history of Afghanistan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".