Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers

by Magnus Marsden

Trading Worlds is an anthropological study of a little understood yet rapidly expanding global trading diaspora, namely the Afghan merchants of Afghanistan, Central Asia and Europe. It contests one-sided images that depict traders from this and other conflict regions as immoral profiteers, the cronies of warlords or international drug smugglers. It shows, rather, the active role these merchants play in an ever-more globalized political economy. Afghan merchants, the author demonstrates, forge and occupy critical economic niches, both at home and from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia, to the ports of the Black Sea; and in global cities such as Istanbul, Moscow and London, the traders' activities are shaping the material and cultural lives of the diverse populations among whom they live.

Through an exploration of the life histories, trading activities and everyday experiences of these mobile merchants, Magnus Marsden shows that traders' worlds are informed by complex forms of knowledge, skill, ethical sensibility, and long-lasting human relationships that often cut across and dissolve boundaries of nation, ethnicity, religion and ideology.

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2015

Reviews

[Collin Jung]

What ethnography should be!! Beyond the introduction to Afghanistan and central Asian trading diasporas, a great read for anyone interested in the universal relationships between movement, money, friendship, trust, instability and belonging in everyday life across all kinds of cultural and social contexts

[Colin]

I had high hopes for this book, as in my experience the Afghan business or commercial community is a far less-studied sector of the country’s contemporary political landscape than its religious, political, or military actors, and I was really interested in reading a systematic analysis of the Afghan merchant community and how it has participated in Afghanistan’s national politics. In the end I struggled to get through the very dense academic writing style of the book. There are some interesting vignettes and lots of details of individual traders’ experiences operating across the border in Tajikistan or in London. But so much of the material is devoted to recounting conversations traders have with each other and the author, and with fluid and constantly caveated concepts of identities, skill, or morality / propriety, that I never felt able to draw a coherent or generalizable lesson from the whole. I rarely read anthropological or ethnological academic books so it’s quite likely that this is a case of my asking a book to be something that it’s not; but even in this regard I felt the book eschewed a systematic approach in how it described the socially enforced conventions that might define these networks of traders as a distinct sociopolitical group. While I envy the access the author was able to achieve and would commend the fieldwork efforts, in the end this book felt more like a collection of still fairly raw field notes that would need another level of refinement and analysis before it could be useful for my purposes as a reader. The bibliography does seem to be quite rich, and so perhaps I’ll be able to use that as a basis for further reading.