Beyond Bukhara: Trade, identity and interregional exchange across Asia

Abstract

This article explores the nature of inter-Asian trade dynamics through a consideration of the role played by traders from northern Afghanistan's Central Asian borderlands in the Chinese international trade city of Yiwu. It explores the role that traders from this region have played in commercial exchanges involving China, the Arabian Peninsula and a range of settings in West Asia. In addition to documenting the inter-Asian scope of these traders' activities, the article also addresses the shifting nature of their identity formations in relationship to successive waves of migration. The traders often identify themselves in relationship to ethnonational identity categories (Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik) that are politically salient in Central Asia and Afghanistan today. At the same time, the traders also emphasise their being from families that migrated from the territories of the Emirate of Bukhara during the early years of communist rule in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Alternative Histories of Muslim Asia’s Urban Centres: De-Cosmopolitanisation and Beyond

“…Migrant communities did continue, however, to live in close proximity in the settings to which they moved. Having explored elsewhere how commercial relationships between Hindu, Sikh and Muslim Afghans played a critical role in the establishment of Afghan networks in Eurasia from the late 1980s onwards (Marsden 2018), I now move away from the geographic peripheries of Muslim Asia and address instead the ongoing significance of minority-Muslim relationships in diasporic relationships in the West.…”

“…For example, in the 1970s, well-to-do Afghan merchants moved their capital outside of Afghanistan as the political situation inside the country worsened in the context of the rising tensions of the Cold War. In New York and New Jersey, Afghan migrants included families that identified themselves as 'Bukharan', having fled Central Asia in the 1920s (Marsden 2018). As a result, Muslim migrants to New York from Afghanistan shared a connected cultural and geographical background with the city's Central Asian Jewish communities.…”

‘Good men don’t elope’: Afghan migrant men’s discourses on labour migration, marriage and masculinity

“…Yet, many other families from Bukhara that had moved permanently to Northern Afghanistan (to a region formerly known as Afghan Turkistan)to escape Soviet purges of local political and economic elites, including wealthy peasants and merchants as well as religious authorities in Central Asia (see Khalid 2014)left Afghanistan in the early 1980s and moved to Pakistan where they established homes and carpet factories in the cities and towns of Pakistan (for example Peshawar and Lahore). Other families that had moved to Pakistan from Afghanistan subsequently migrated to other destinations in the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, where initially they set up commercial activities that supplied goods and services (for example opening cafes and eateries or selling prayer mats) to pilgrims visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Madinah during the Hajj pilgrimage season (see Marsden 2018).…”

“…As was the case with Afghanistan, this necessitated the deployment of human capital outside the country, for example, in the form of long-distance traders or migrant workers. 1 Migration, often circular in nature, has thus been a key feature of Afghan life and central to the modern history of Afghanistan (see, Marsden 2018).…”

Muslim circulations and networks in West Asia: Ethnographic perspectives on transregional connectivity

“…In particular, the bread and restaurant businesses were important sectors in which Afghanistan’s Central Asian émigrés became active; critical too was the import from China and Turkey of machine-made prayer carpets and cheap clothing. These items are brought by pilgrims visiting Saudi Arabia, as well as by the millions of foreign laborers who live and work there (see Marsden, 2018).…”