HIST048 PO - Afghanistan: Crossroads of Asia

When Offered: Offered alternate years
Instructor(s): A. Khazeni
Credit: 1

Afghanistan often appears in the Western imagination as a barren land, a forbidding wilderness of tribes and ‘graveyard of empires’.  This perception overlooks its cosmopolitan history as a crossroads between South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, its rich traditions of Buddhism and Islam, and place in the development of Persianate literary culture.  The land of Afghanistan was once an entrepot on the ‘Silk Roads’ and home to the lost city of Turquoise Mountain before it was destroyed by the Mongols.  Its cities were trading and artistic centers in the early modern Timurid age and places in between Mughal India and Safavid Persia before the emergence of the Afghan Durrani Empire.  During the nineteenth century, it became a colonial borderland in the ‘Great Game’, resisting the intrusions of European empires.  The course traces the global history of Afghanistan through its archives, literature, and arts.