Papers by Francesca Fuoli
The Historical Journal, 2024
Eric Hobsbawm argued that banditry was an archaic and pre-political phenomenon that emerged simul... more Eric Hobsbawm argued that banditry was an archaic and pre-political phenomenon that emerged simultaneously and with striking intensity in different regions around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While it has often been seen as marginal in global histories, banditry provides an essential gateway to the study of modern history from a global perspective. Drawing on different regional case studies, this article approaches the similarities and connections that ran through different instances of banditry in terms of their inclusion within the global dynamics of imperial expansion, capitalism, and the developing notions of territoriality and sovereignty. It argues that the ubiquitous presence of banditry in this period was propelled by the deep-running changes to local relations of class, economy, and power that resulted from these accelerating global dynamics. Bandits emerged as the expression of rural communities in all their complexity and were able to negotiate their place within the rapidly evolving societies of this period. Far from being victims, bandits were key agents who navigated change, adaptation, and resistance in the modern world. In this sense, banditry was a powerful expression of the different ways in which rural com- munities interacted, negotiated, and clashed with the global.
Afghanistan, 2018
This article analyses the British-led demarcation of Afghanistan’s north-western border in the Ma... more This article analyses the British-led demarcation of Afghanistan’s north-western border in the Maimena region between 1884–7. Historians of Afghanistan have largely neglected the Afghan Boundary Commission as a minor episode in Amir Abdur Rahman Khan’s process of internal reform and ‘modernisation’. This article nuances these approaches and reconsiders the role of boundary-making as an instrument for building empire at the level of local indigenous political organisation. It argues that the demarcation became an occasion for increasing British interference in Afghan affairs that aimed at establishing embryonic forms of colonial rule along Afghanistan’s borderlands. Commissioners sought the collaboration of local intermediaries – Afghan officials and ethnic minorities – in ways that bypassed official relations with the court in Kabul. The Boundary Commission became instrumental in enabling the extension and consolidation of the government of Kabul’s authority over previously semi-autonomous areas. In the long term, it became the blueprint for the demarcation of Afghanistan’s northern boundaries in Turkestan, Badakhshan and the Pamirs.
AFGHANISTAN AFGHANISTAN is a refereed journal published twice a year in April and October. It cov... more AFGHANISTAN AFGHANISTAN is a refereed journal published twice a year in April and October. It covers all subjects in the humanities including history, art, archaeology, architecture, geography, numismatics, literature, religion, social sciences and contemporary issues from the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods. Articles are not restricted to the present borders of Afghanistan and can include the surrounding regions, but must relate to Afghanistan.
Dissertation Abstract by Francesca Fuoli
Dissertation Abstract
This dissertation is a study of British policies of state-building and administrative reform carr... more This dissertation is a study of British policies of state-building and administrative reform carried out in Afghanistan during the second Anglo-Afghan war (1878-81) and the mechanisms through which these were adapted and indigenised by the Afghan political elite over the following years (1881-1900). In particular, it discusses the government of India's policies during the wartime occupation of Kabul and Kandahar and the British-led boundary commission that defined Afghanistan's borders in the 1880-90s. I argue that these were formative moments for British reforms of Afghan institutions, especially at the local level, and were crucial for shaping Afghanistan into a subordinate polity included within the sphere of British paramountcy. This thesis addresses the question of Afghanistan's place within the British empire and the extent to which we can think about Afghanistan as a colonised polity. It investigates the ways in which colonial ideas about Afghan society, systematised around the categories of tribe, ethnicity and sect by the second half of the nineteenth century, informed the government of India's approach and ultimately influenced native processes of territorial annexation and institution-building.
Chapter one discusses the changes in the government of India's policy towards Afghanistan from 1869 to 1878 and argues that by the late 1870s the government of India understood Afghanistan as part of the regional framework of the Indian princely states. Chapter two discusses the British occupation of Kabul and Kandahar in 1879-81. It highlights British plans to break up the Afghan kingdom into subordinated native states under colonial direct and indirect rule. Chapter three shows that British-led boundary-making in north western Afghanistan (1884-7) became an instrument of colonial interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs, especially at the local level. Chapter four discusses the delimitation of the Durand Line (1893-6) and shows that the government of India resisted the amir's repeated requests to lay down an international boundary preventing further British expansion into the northwest , thereby defying the implementation of modern ideas of territoriality along this border. Chapter five and concluding remarks suggest that by the 1890s the Kabul administration adopted policies of social difference that were influenced by the state-building practices first applied during colonial boundary-making.
Conference Presentations by Francesca Fuoli
Program of the International conference of the International Association for Alpine History (IAAH... more Program of the International conference of the International Association for Alpine History (IAAH), 3-4 of September 2020
'Comparing Colonialism: Beyond Modern Exceptionalism' Conference. Basel, Switzerland (upcoming), 2018
In the decades that followed the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British colonial state in India pursu... more In the decades that followed the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British colonial state in India pursued a policy of consolidation and administrative systematisation. More strikingly, at the same time, it also pursued active territorial expansion along its northern frontiers, something that has often been overlooked in historical writing on the period. In the northwest , the British incorporated Baluchistan, Dir, Swat, Hunza, Chitral, Kashmir, pushing their frontier upwards. In the case of Afghanistan, they attempted to break up the region into a number of colonies to which they applied alternatively the models of the Indian Princely States and of the directly ruled domains. As a consequence of these policies, Afghanistan went from being a loose political entity to becoming the state we know it today. This paper shows that this late expansion in South Asia continued many of the forms and strategies pursued during the early days of the East India Company conquest, thus questioning historians' arguments about a radical shift in the quality and outlook of the modern colonial state in the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that at the fringes of empire, the British continued to be comfortable with ideas and practices of colonisation that were not part of Western modernity and which continued to embed native power and politics into their empire-building. The case of Afghanistan re-focuses the debate on the meanings and boundaries of colonialism, especially when pursued without formal rule, and what should be understood under colony. In this context, this paper engages with the contradictory ideas that the British Indian government applied during its territorial expansion: they combined ideas of modern international boundaries and Westphalian statehood with blurred ideas on sovereignty and territoriality. Afghanistan became a ground of experimentation where colonial officials themselves refused to box their understandings of Afghanistan's place within the British empire in clearly defined categories. They continued to use terms such as protectorate, sphere of interference, buffer state and colony interchangeably, without precisely laying down their meaning. The ideas of statehood and colonial influence elaborated in this context would be taken, via military expeditions and boundary commissions to, among other regions, Eastern Africa and the Arabic Peninsula, thus highlighting the empire-wide importance of this case study.
Global Social History Workshop, London School of Economics , 2019
Banditry, as Eric Hobsbawm has said in his path-breaking studies, was an archaic and pre-politica... more Banditry, as Eric Hobsbawm has said in his path-breaking studies, was an archaic and pre-political phenomenon that, strikingly, occurred in abnormally large numbers during the nineteenth and twentieth century. While it has often been seen as marginal for national, let alone global histories, banditry can provide a new perspective for debating social history from a global perspective. Episodes of banditry emerged in different areas of the world. Hobsbawm points to the universality and uniformity of these phenomena across the globe, which were not the result of cultural diffusion but the 'reflection of similar situations within peasant societies, whether in China, Peru, Sicily, the Ukraine, or Indonesia'. Banditry emerged in response to the power of outside authority and capital, dynamics that had global impact and ramifications. It interested those areas where states and empires were becoming more present, less 'visitors', as had been the case for pre-modern polities, and more 'permanent residents': they extracted taxes, enrolled their inhabitants for military service, extended and improved the policing of the population, were able to gather more sophisticated information about those within their borders and controlled wandering and mobile people. In this context, banditry arose out of peasant discontent against worsening economic conditions and changes in the structures of labour and capital, often merging to large social movements as was the case for the Brigantaggio in post-unification Italy.
Mountains, like banditry, have long been considered at the margins of grand historical dynamics. Yet, the two were intrinsically linked in their importance for shaping empire and states. The history of bandits, brigands and outlaws was often that of mountains and vice versa. These environments have provided refuge for run-aways but they have also been important sites where movements of protests and rebellion originated, in the forms of religious heterodoxies (e.g. Lazzarettists) or anti-colonial movements (e.g. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan). At the same time, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mountain regions in nation-states and empires were areas where states expanded their powers, frontiers drawn and competing polities fought off. Here, it was the extension of state power and law that 'made’ bandits as in mountain regions the global dynamics that often ignited these episodes were felt particularly strongly, for example in the case of the dismantling of the commons (also a global phenomenon at this time). As a result, large numbers of unskilled labourers and landless peasants departed mountain regions, as in the case of modern Italy, and were increasingly drawn into the global flows of migration between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
This paper builds on Hobsbawm’s work on banditry and re-thinks it in the context of the debates and approaches of global history. I take the case studies of Italy’s war against the Brigantaggio in both southern Italy and the Eritrean colony during the post-unification decades and link them to the global context that gave rise to comparable movements around the world. The paper thinks about protesting and rebellious mountain people across the globe as protagonists and agents of the transformations that have shaped the modern world. It addresses questions such as: what were the global transformations that ignited banditry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How did bandits interact with them? How, in turn, were they shaped by global dynamics? What was the role of bandits as promotors of global integration processes? In this way, the paper aims to evaluate whether a global approach to banditry allows us to think about subalterns as a class with global connotations.
'Afghanistan in Academia' Conference. SOAS, London, 2018
India started to understand Afghanistan as part of the regional framework of Indian princely stat... more India started to understand Afghanistan as part of the regional framework of Indian princely states and actively sought to bring the region within this orbit. In particular, it put increasing pressure on the amir Shere Ali Khan for access to his territories and the establishment of an Afghan residency system on the Indian example. In this logic, his paper questions the second half of the nineteenth century as a period of non-intervention in Afghan affairs and shows that the government of India continued to use annexation and intervention as instruments in empire building along its northwestern frontier. It also shows that geopolitical concerns over Russian competition were not central to the government of India's policy. On the contrary, amir Shere Ali Khan's efforts at centralising and strengthening his rule were seen as a more immediate threat to British India's security and his reluctance to comply with British requests for greater access directly triggered British military intervention.
'Mountstuart Elphinstone and the Historical Foundations of Afghanistan Studies: Reframing Colonia... more 'Mountstuart Elphinstone and the Historical Foundations of Afghanistan Studies: Reframing Colonial Knowledge of the Indo-Persian World in the Post-Colonial Era', 6 November 2015
Abstract: This paper analyses the making of Afghanistan’s north-western border. It argues that colonial debates and local practices on occasion of the Afghan Boundary Commission’s (ABC) long permanence in the area – from 1884 to 1887 – identified this as British India’s effective imperial boundary. The close connections the boundary commission forged with local Afghan administrators and the representatives of the non-Pashtun populations living in the area show that the extension of colonial influence through indirect means was a main goal of the ABC. The work of the boundary commission also had a fundamental role in asserting the amir’s authority over areas in which this had previously been precarious and indirect at best. With the boundary demarcation the government of Kabul annexed a new portion of country to its domains over which governance practices were asserted that differed from those in place until that point. This paper links colonial intervention in the process of Afghan state-building with the formulation of ‘tribe’ as the principal social category for the territorial establishment of the Afghan state, as well as its internal administrative reformation. The category of ‘tribe’ was used on occasion of the boundary demarcation as the main criteria for land adjudication, both by Russia and British India, and employed by the British officials on the ground to ‘advise’ the government of Kabul over the resettlement of mainly non-Pashtun populations. On the side of the government of Kabul, the principles employed for the settlement of the frontier were incorporated and were at the basis for the policy of colonizing the newly created border with Pashtun settlers from southern Afghanistan.
Talks by Francesca Fuoli
'Shi'i-Sunni Conflict in Islam: Past, Present and Future, University of Edinburgh, 16 November 20... more 'Shi'i-Sunni Conflict in Islam: Past, Present and Future, University of Edinburgh, 16 November 2015
SOAS South Asia History Seminar, 7 May 2013.
Abstract: The years between the two Anglo-Afghan... more SOAS South Asia History Seminar, 7 May 2013.
Abstract: The years between the two Anglo-Afghan wars –1842 and 1878 – have
commonly been understood in terms of Afghan voluntary isolation and British India’s loss of interest in the country, epitomised by its strategy of “Masterly Inactivity”. However, the proliferation of record materials on Afghanistan produced by the colonial state in this period, ranging from documents exchanged at a high political level to the flow of information originating from the permanent government representative in Kabul, first appointed in 1856, may tell a very different story. In these same years a strong interest in the study of the Pashtuns began to gain ground among British officials, especially the figures of H. G. Raverty and H. W. Bellew, as demonstrated by the appearance of a number of Pashto grammars, dictionaries, as well as ethnographic and historical studies. Focusing on the way the Pashto idiom was framed as a territorially bounded, standardised and original language, I will argue that this ethnographic knowledge significantly contributed to the emergence of an official colonial discourse in which the Afghan social landscape was framed along clearly demarcated racial lines, among which the Pashtuns, glorified as a superior, manly and martial race, were the legitimate inhabitants of the country.
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Papers by Francesca Fuoli
Dissertation Abstract by Francesca Fuoli
Chapter one discusses the changes in the government of India's policy towards Afghanistan from 1869 to 1878 and argues that by the late 1870s the government of India understood Afghanistan as part of the regional framework of the Indian princely states. Chapter two discusses the British occupation of Kabul and Kandahar in 1879-81. It highlights British plans to break up the Afghan kingdom into subordinated native states under colonial direct and indirect rule. Chapter three shows that British-led boundary-making in north western Afghanistan (1884-7) became an instrument of colonial interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs, especially at the local level. Chapter four discusses the delimitation of the Durand Line (1893-6) and shows that the government of India resisted the amir's repeated requests to lay down an international boundary preventing further British expansion into the northwest , thereby defying the implementation of modern ideas of territoriality along this border. Chapter five and concluding remarks suggest that by the 1890s the Kabul administration adopted policies of social difference that were influenced by the state-building practices first applied during colonial boundary-making.
Conference Presentations by Francesca Fuoli
Mountains, like banditry, have long been considered at the margins of grand historical dynamics. Yet, the two were intrinsically linked in their importance for shaping empire and states. The history of bandits, brigands and outlaws was often that of mountains and vice versa. These environments have provided refuge for run-aways but they have also been important sites where movements of protests and rebellion originated, in the forms of religious heterodoxies (e.g. Lazzarettists) or anti-colonial movements (e.g. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan). At the same time, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mountain regions in nation-states and empires were areas where states expanded their powers, frontiers drawn and competing polities fought off. Here, it was the extension of state power and law that 'made’ bandits as in mountain regions the global dynamics that often ignited these episodes were felt particularly strongly, for example in the case of the dismantling of the commons (also a global phenomenon at this time). As a result, large numbers of unskilled labourers and landless peasants departed mountain regions, as in the case of modern Italy, and were increasingly drawn into the global flows of migration between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
This paper builds on Hobsbawm’s work on banditry and re-thinks it in the context of the debates and approaches of global history. I take the case studies of Italy’s war against the Brigantaggio in both southern Italy and the Eritrean colony during the post-unification decades and link them to the global context that gave rise to comparable movements around the world. The paper thinks about protesting and rebellious mountain people across the globe as protagonists and agents of the transformations that have shaped the modern world. It addresses questions such as: what were the global transformations that ignited banditry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How did bandits interact with them? How, in turn, were they shaped by global dynamics? What was the role of bandits as promotors of global integration processes? In this way, the paper aims to evaluate whether a global approach to banditry allows us to think about subalterns as a class with global connotations.
Abstract: This paper analyses the making of Afghanistan’s north-western border. It argues that colonial debates and local practices on occasion of the Afghan Boundary Commission’s (ABC) long permanence in the area – from 1884 to 1887 – identified this as British India’s effective imperial boundary. The close connections the boundary commission forged with local Afghan administrators and the representatives of the non-Pashtun populations living in the area show that the extension of colonial influence through indirect means was a main goal of the ABC. The work of the boundary commission also had a fundamental role in asserting the amir’s authority over areas in which this had previously been precarious and indirect at best. With the boundary demarcation the government of Kabul annexed a new portion of country to its domains over which governance practices were asserted that differed from those in place until that point. This paper links colonial intervention in the process of Afghan state-building with the formulation of ‘tribe’ as the principal social category for the territorial establishment of the Afghan state, as well as its internal administrative reformation. The category of ‘tribe’ was used on occasion of the boundary demarcation as the main criteria for land adjudication, both by Russia and British India, and employed by the British officials on the ground to ‘advise’ the government of Kabul over the resettlement of mainly non-Pashtun populations. On the side of the government of Kabul, the principles employed for the settlement of the frontier were incorporated and were at the basis for the policy of colonizing the newly created border with Pashtun settlers from southern Afghanistan.
Talks by Francesca Fuoli
Abstract: The years between the two Anglo-Afghan wars –1842 and 1878 – have
commonly been understood in terms of Afghan voluntary isolation and British India’s loss of interest in the country, epitomised by its strategy of “Masterly Inactivity”. However, the proliferation of record materials on Afghanistan produced by the colonial state in this period, ranging from documents exchanged at a high political level to the flow of information originating from the permanent government representative in Kabul, first appointed in 1856, may tell a very different story. In these same years a strong interest in the study of the Pashtuns began to gain ground among British officials, especially the figures of H. G. Raverty and H. W. Bellew, as demonstrated by the appearance of a number of Pashto grammars, dictionaries, as well as ethnographic and historical studies. Focusing on the way the Pashto idiom was framed as a territorially bounded, standardised and original language, I will argue that this ethnographic knowledge significantly contributed to the emergence of an official colonial discourse in which the Afghan social landscape was framed along clearly demarcated racial lines, among which the Pashtuns, glorified as a superior, manly and martial race, were the legitimate inhabitants of the country.
Chapter one discusses the changes in the government of India's policy towards Afghanistan from 1869 to 1878 and argues that by the late 1870s the government of India understood Afghanistan as part of the regional framework of the Indian princely states. Chapter two discusses the British occupation of Kabul and Kandahar in 1879-81. It highlights British plans to break up the Afghan kingdom into subordinated native states under colonial direct and indirect rule. Chapter three shows that British-led boundary-making in north western Afghanistan (1884-7) became an instrument of colonial interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs, especially at the local level. Chapter four discusses the delimitation of the Durand Line (1893-6) and shows that the government of India resisted the amir's repeated requests to lay down an international boundary preventing further British expansion into the northwest , thereby defying the implementation of modern ideas of territoriality along this border. Chapter five and concluding remarks suggest that by the 1890s the Kabul administration adopted policies of social difference that were influenced by the state-building practices first applied during colonial boundary-making.
Mountains, like banditry, have long been considered at the margins of grand historical dynamics. Yet, the two were intrinsically linked in their importance for shaping empire and states. The history of bandits, brigands and outlaws was often that of mountains and vice versa. These environments have provided refuge for run-aways but they have also been important sites where movements of protests and rebellion originated, in the forms of religious heterodoxies (e.g. Lazzarettists) or anti-colonial movements (e.g. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan). At the same time, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mountain regions in nation-states and empires were areas where states expanded their powers, frontiers drawn and competing polities fought off. Here, it was the extension of state power and law that 'made’ bandits as in mountain regions the global dynamics that often ignited these episodes were felt particularly strongly, for example in the case of the dismantling of the commons (also a global phenomenon at this time). As a result, large numbers of unskilled labourers and landless peasants departed mountain regions, as in the case of modern Italy, and were increasingly drawn into the global flows of migration between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
This paper builds on Hobsbawm’s work on banditry and re-thinks it in the context of the debates and approaches of global history. I take the case studies of Italy’s war against the Brigantaggio in both southern Italy and the Eritrean colony during the post-unification decades and link them to the global context that gave rise to comparable movements around the world. The paper thinks about protesting and rebellious mountain people across the globe as protagonists and agents of the transformations that have shaped the modern world. It addresses questions such as: what were the global transformations that ignited banditry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How did bandits interact with them? How, in turn, were they shaped by global dynamics? What was the role of bandits as promotors of global integration processes? In this way, the paper aims to evaluate whether a global approach to banditry allows us to think about subalterns as a class with global connotations.
Abstract: This paper analyses the making of Afghanistan’s north-western border. It argues that colonial debates and local practices on occasion of the Afghan Boundary Commission’s (ABC) long permanence in the area – from 1884 to 1887 – identified this as British India’s effective imperial boundary. The close connections the boundary commission forged with local Afghan administrators and the representatives of the non-Pashtun populations living in the area show that the extension of colonial influence through indirect means was a main goal of the ABC. The work of the boundary commission also had a fundamental role in asserting the amir’s authority over areas in which this had previously been precarious and indirect at best. With the boundary demarcation the government of Kabul annexed a new portion of country to its domains over which governance practices were asserted that differed from those in place until that point. This paper links colonial intervention in the process of Afghan state-building with the formulation of ‘tribe’ as the principal social category for the territorial establishment of the Afghan state, as well as its internal administrative reformation. The category of ‘tribe’ was used on occasion of the boundary demarcation as the main criteria for land adjudication, both by Russia and British India, and employed by the British officials on the ground to ‘advise’ the government of Kabul over the resettlement of mainly non-Pashtun populations. On the side of the government of Kabul, the principles employed for the settlement of the frontier were incorporated and were at the basis for the policy of colonizing the newly created border with Pashtun settlers from southern Afghanistan.
Abstract: The years between the two Anglo-Afghan wars –1842 and 1878 – have
commonly been understood in terms of Afghan voluntary isolation and British India’s loss of interest in the country, epitomised by its strategy of “Masterly Inactivity”. However, the proliferation of record materials on Afghanistan produced by the colonial state in this period, ranging from documents exchanged at a high political level to the flow of information originating from the permanent government representative in Kabul, first appointed in 1856, may tell a very different story. In these same years a strong interest in the study of the Pashtuns began to gain ground among British officials, especially the figures of H. G. Raverty and H. W. Bellew, as demonstrated by the appearance of a number of Pashto grammars, dictionaries, as well as ethnographic and historical studies. Focusing on the way the Pashto idiom was framed as a territorially bounded, standardised and original language, I will argue that this ethnographic knowledge significantly contributed to the emergence of an official colonial discourse in which the Afghan social landscape was framed along clearly demarcated racial lines, among which the Pashtuns, glorified as a superior, manly and martial race, were the legitimate inhabitants of the country.