Whether entering Europe as refugees or undergoing violent repression by the Iranian border patrol, Afghan migrants are often depicted in scholarship and popular media as the agentless victims of state collapse and ill-conceived international interventions. In these portrayals, their country is paradoxically described as both a ‘remote’ ‘buffer zone’ shaped by a ‘great game’ in which the only players were Europeans and a geopolitically significant ‘graveyard of empires.’[1]
Over centuries, however, itinerant groups and individual travellers have connected the territories that now compose Afghanistan to the wider world. This chapter examines the experiences of mobile traders from the region, the networks they form, and the various contexts in which they operate. The commercial activities, histories, communities, and geographies of these traders underscore their continued relevance, resilience, and vitality. The chapter also highlights the traders’ activities, skills, cultural knowledge, and linguistic abilities, rather than dwelling on the negative portrayals of them by nation states and distant empires.[2]
Central Asia and the Fur Trade
I will begin by focusing on Karakul fur, a well-known product from Afghanistan and neighbouring Central Asian regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Karakul (or qaraqol) breed of sheep is native to the arid lands of Central Asia. Many fur traders, armchair historians, and early twentieth-century scientists have posited that the breed was one of the first varieties of sheep to be domesticated. Some trace the breed’s history to the dawn of civilization, arguing that the animal sacrificed by Abraham was likely to have been an ancestor of the Karakul.[3]
In the nineteenth century, Karakul sheep were exclusively raised in Central Asia by nomadic herdsmen—particularly those who identified themselves as ‘Turkmen’. Turkmen pastoralists slaughtered Karakul lambs within days, if not hours, of their birth to produce pelts that were renowned in the region and beyond for their curly and glossy fur. The pelts were bought by itinerant traders (many of whom were Persian-speaking Jews) and transported to the historic city of Bukhara, a commercial centre of long-term significance for the ‘Silk Road’ trade network.[4] In Bukhara’s ancient caravanserais—institutions dotted along the trade routes that combined the functions of an inn and market—Muslim artisans cleaned, cured, and dried the pelts. Traders—both Muslim and Jewish—then sold them or transported them to other commercial centres.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, most Karakul skins were transported out of Bukhara to Iran, Afghanistan, and the Caucasus by camel caravans led by nomadic tribes.[5] Many societies in this expansive region valued Karakul fur, as it was used to make hats and clothes generally worn by men of authority, including aristocratic elites, tribal elders, and state and military officials.
After 1850, Karakul fur became a fashion mainstay in Europe and the United States, where it was known as ‘Persian lamb’ or ‘Astrakhan fur’. By the 1880s, US fashion magazines regularly commented on the popularity of women’s coats made from Persian lamb. In 1895, the second son of Afghanistan’s emir visited London and presented Queen Victoria with a gift of eighty Karakul pelts.[6] In the 1920s, Astrakhan coats were popularized by glamorous Russians émigrés—some of whom captivated audiences with their performances in ballets and plays.[7]
This new and expanding market for Karakul fur changed the nature of trade in Central Asia as well as the region’s relations with the world. From the 1850s onwards, caravans transported pelts to the Russian city of Nizhni Novgorod, where several trade fairs were held each year. In Nizhni, Muslim and Jewish merchants from Central Asia and Iran sold pelts to buyers from Moscow, where they were then shipped on steamships via the Volga River. Muscovite dressers treated the furs, and drapers used them to make items of clothing popular in Russia. Pelts were also transported by German and Russian traders to Leipzig, the global centre of the fur trade at the time. The pelts had become so valuable by the 1880s that Central Asian merchants transported them to Nizhni in cargo and later passenger trains that traversed the new Trans-Caspian railroad. It was these trains, and the merchants who travelled on them, that helped spread the ‘Russian flu’—the first pandemic of the industrial age, which resulted in one million deaths between 1889 and 1894—from Bukhara to Europe and the United States.[8] In the early 1900s, German fur traders opened offices in the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand, both located in present-day Uzbekistan, to avoid buying Karakul pelts from middlemen.
From the 1920s onwards, the slaughter of young lambs for their pelts led people in Europe and the US to decry the use of Karakul fur in clothing manufacture. However, European traders recounted the care with which Central Asian shepherds, artisans, and merchants treated their livestock and the pelts from which they made a living. In fact, it was the European merchants in Nizhni Novgorod who were often admonished by their Central Asian counterparts for mishandling their precious goods.
After the Russian Revolution began in 1917, nomadic Turkmen communities fled the arid lands of Central Asia in the tens of thousands; most settled with their flocks on the other side of the Amu Darya, one of the region’s longest rivers, in northern Afghanistan. In 1920, the Bolsheviks attacked Bukhara and deposed the emir, who sought refuge in Kabul. Jewish and Muslim Central Asian merchants left Bukhara for Afghanistan; many arrived in Kabul with their entire stocks of skins, carpets, and silks. Some merchants established firms in Mashhad in Persia and Peshawar in British India, while others moved to the international centres of the fur trade: Leipzig, London, and New York.
Initially, the new arrivals were employed as Karakul ‘specialists’ who introduced the methods of sorting and assembling furs they had learned in Bukhara and Nizhni Novgorod. Leaders of the fur trade in London credited these traders with ‘modernising’ traditional fur markets. After a decade or so, several Jewish traders from Central Asia established firms of their own in London and New York, often returning to Afghanistan to purchase furs from the Muslim Turkmen tribes with whom they and their families had established close relationships over generations. Starting in the 1930s, these traders also made regular visits to Leningrad to buy furs at the annual state-run auction held in the specially constructed ‘Fur Palace’. The itineraries of these traders played an important role in connecting North America, Western Europe, and the USSR—parts of the world that became increasingly separated from one another during the Cold War.
Jewish traders from Central Asia became prominent in the international and cosmopolitan world of the global fur trade.[9] Fashion trade journals such as Women’s Wear Daily commemorated their deaths with obituaries that described them as ‘leaders in the Afghan fur trade’. In the mid-1930s, the London headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the world’s most famous firm dealing in furs, appointed Elli Simkhaeff, a Jewish trader originally from the city of Kokand (located in present-day Uzbekistan), to oversee its trade in Karakul furs. Simkhaeff continued to perform this role until 1968. During that period, Jewish Central Asian merchants also built and maintained close relationships with government officials and merchants in Afghanistan. In London, they shared their offices with Muslim merchants from Afghanistan and regularly invited Afghan diplomatic officials to their homes.
The hospitality offered by Jewish merchants to their Muslim guests drew on a shared cultural repertoire. A man of Bukharan Jewish heritage in London told me that he remembers seeing his father and guests eating a homemade dish of rice and meat known as palaw that is popular amongst Muslims and Jews across Central Asia. The gathered men sat as they would have in Central Asia: cross-legged on a floor covered in handwoven carpets. Another man told me how his Jewish father would serve whisky discreetly to his Muslim guests who drank alcohol: ‘The Muslim guests who drank would excuse themselves to go to the toilet but in fact head to the breakfast room for a glass of whisky’. During such moments of hospitality, Jewish hosts demonstrated respect for and understanding of the religious sensibilities of their Muslim guests by ensuring that those who wished to drink could do so out of the view of others who regarded the consumption of alcohol as un-Islamic.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 caused trade between the country and the West to dwindle. Fur traders in Europe and the US sourced their goods from the regions which Karakul sheep had travelled to earlier in the century, particularly Namibia and the Soviet states of Central Asia. The last London auctions at which Karakul skins from Afghanistan were sold were held in the mid-1980s.
Hamidullah’s Story
Many of the Central Asian Muslims who fled the Bolshevik assault on Bukhara in 1920 sought refuge in Afghanistan, using their skills in trade and craftsmanship to make a living, establish families, and reproduce communal life.[10] The story of Hamidullah, the grandson of a Central Asian refugee, highlights the ongoing importance of the forms of travel sketched out in this chapter, albeit in very different circumstances.[11]
Hamidullah’s ancestors moved to Afghanistan from Central Asia in the early twentieth century. His mother’s father, Abdur Rahman, came from a family of wealthy Bukharan merchants. Spotted by a Bolshevik patrol as he was leaving Bukhara during the attack on the city, he buried the family’s wealth at the base of a tree, was wounded in a firefight, and found shelter in a cattle shed. Days later, unable to recover the buried fortune, he crossed the border into northern Afghanistan and settled in the city of Mazar-e Sharif, where he found work in the stables of a local dignitary. Abdur Rahman eventually left Mazar-e Sharif for Kabul. He worked as a chef in a teahouse, serving Central Asia’s famed dish of meat and rice, palaw-e uzbeki. After some time, he married into a Kabuli family, and his wife gave birth to Hamidullah’s mother, Bibi Gul.
Hamidullah’s father’s mother also fled Central Asia in the wake of the Soviet revolution. Born in Darwaz, a district in the easternmost region of the Emirate of Bukhara, she and her brothers left by crossing the fast-flowing Pyanj River in a boat made of cow skin. The river travels through Darwaz and today marks the boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The family settled in a village in Badakhshan, a province of northeastern Afghanistan, on property gifted to them by the state. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Afghan state resettled tens of thousands of refugees from Central Asia in this manner, mostly in the north of the country but also in new settlements established in the south.
The brothers soon arranged for their sister to marry Mullah Boy, who was also from ‘across the river’. Before the 1917 revolution, Mullah Boy had left Central Asia to study at the renowned Islamic seminary in Deoband in northern India. Having completed his training and achieving recognition as a trained religious scholar, he left Deoband with the expectation of returning to his family home. Upon reaching Badakhshan, however, Mullah Boy was told that he would be killed by the Bolsheviks if he returned to Central Asia. In the 1930s, the couple married and settled in a village in Badakhshan, where Hamidullah’s father, Azizullah, was born.
Hamidullah told me that his grandfather Mullah Boy died in the 1950s. Shortly thereafter, Hamidullah’s grandmother fell ill with tuberculosis. and her brothers took her to Kabul for treatment. After recovering, she discovered that her brothers had sold the house in which she and her husband had lived and would not share the proceeds. To survive and raise Azizullah, she earned money working as a seamstress in Kabul.
Hamidullah’s grandmother eventually remarried. Her new husband ran a watch repair workshop in a bazaar in Kabul. Azizullah learned how to repair watches from his stepfather. After his stepfather’s death, a generous merchant in the market employed Azizullah as an apprentice. From the 1950s onwards, many Muslim Central Asian refugees living in Kabul made a living by trading and repairing watches imported from Switzerland.
Azizullah made a good living repairing watches. He married Bibi Gul, Abdur Rahman’s daughter. In the 1970s, he earned money in Afghanistan by repairing the watches of the soldiers he served alongside while completing his military service. Later that same decade, he opened a workshop of his own in Pul-e Mahmood, a neighbourhood of Kabul’s ‘old city’ where many Jewish and Muslim traders from Central Asia dealt in furs, carpets, and foreign currency. Running a workshop enabled him to expand his social and commercial relationships; he soon established a name for himself as an expert in watch repair.
In the early 1980s, Azizullah was called for a second round of military service in the Afghan Army. This was a dangerous prospect in the aftermath of the 1979 Soviet invasion, so to avoid conscription he took his family to Pakistan. In Karachi, the family established a watch repair business and lived in Sohrab Goth, an area of the city where many Muslim Central Asian émigré families were settling in the 1980s.
In 1992, a friend of Azizullah’s visited him in Karachi and encouraged the family to move to Tajikistan. This friend helped them secure visas, and they travelled to Tajikistan through Afghanistan. The family lived in Khujand during Tajikistan’s civil war and then moved to Dushanbe, where they established a watch repair business in the Sadbarg market—a trading complex that housed the businesses of hundreds of Afghans in the 1990s. While living in Tajikistan, the family had an opportunity to settle in Canada as refugees, but Hamidullah’s paternal grandmother, who lived with them, refused. She said that she did not wish to live in a non-Muslim country. Eventually, she died as a refugee in Tajikistan, the same territory where she was born before the country was created by the Soviet Union.
In 2005, a few years after international forces and local militias removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the family decided to return to Kabul, where they opened another watch repair workshop. Doing business in Kabul proved difficult and dangerous. Frustrated with the situation, Hamidullah returned to Karachi without asking his father’s permission and undertook training in mobile telephone repair. Azizullah was upset that his son travelled to Pakistan without his permission, but their relationship was soon mended. Both men agreed that the entire family should live ‘as one’ in Karachi. They opened a workshop that repaired both watches and mobile telephones, a successful business that meant the family could lead a ‘pleasant life’ in the bustling port city.
After 2010, the security situation in Karachi deteriorated because of interethnic violence. Hamidullah’s shop was located across the street from his family’s apartment, but since the road also served as the frontline between different ethno-linguistic groups, he and his brothers often had to spend the night in the workshop owing to the fierce fighting outside. In this increasingly violent context, they returned to Dushanbe, and opened, once more, a business in the Sadbarg market.
By 2015, Dushanbe had become hostile for Afghan refugees. Tajikistan state officials depicted Afghans migrants as engaging in the illegal drug trade and terrorist activities; the country’s ruling elite also resented the size and scale of the businesses that successful Afghan traders had established in the city.[12] Afghan refugees were prohibited from living inside the city; those who did had to pay regular bribes to the police. In 2016, the family invested their savings in securing visas to Turkey. After arriving in Istanbul, they settled in Zeytinburnu, a working-class district that has been home to Central Asian and Afghan families since the 1950s. Once again, the family established a business in watch and telephone repair.
The commercial climate in Istanbul was difficult because of high costs and competition. Rather than lose their savings in a failing business, the family used what remained to buy a small apartment in the industrial town of Çerkezköy, west of Istanbul. Without sufficient capital to open his own shop, Hamidullah earned a salary repairing watches in a Turkish-owned business, and both his brothers repaired mobile telephones in shops nearby. In their spare time, the brothers continued their trade in secondhand watches bought in online auctions.
Over the years, Hamidullah had married and established a family of his own. His children were born in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Turkey. ‘We have been refugees moving around for four generations’, he told me. ‘My children have been born in three different countries, and we now live in Turkey and will soon, by the grace of God, be granted Turkish citizenship’.
When the family was living in Karachi, Hamidullah’s younger brother fell in love. He maintained the relationship after moving to Dushanbe and Turkey, eventually travelling from Istanbul to propose. But when he arrived in Karachi, her parents were mistrustful and asked him, ‘Who are you? One day you’re in Karachi, the next in Tajikistan and then in Turkey. Are you an ISIS terrorist?’ He replied, ‘I’m not a terrorist, I’m a tourist. My family and I like travelling and seeing the world’. He then left, vowing never to return.
Hamidullah told me that his family’s experiences moving among four countries for over a century had shaped their approach to life. ‘We always stay together’, he said. ‘The last time my family members opted to travel alone they lost contact with their relatives forever. Even if we have opportunities to go to a better place alone, we prefer to remain together.’
The networks explored in this chapter reflect modern forms of national and geopolitical dynamics, while also being shaped by commercial arrangements and geographies. Exploring these connections reveals the importance of circulatory forms of mobility that connect multiple settings. Moreover, this research questions the relevance of conventional models that treat migrant communities as merely transnational extensions of nation states.
The traders presented in this chapter are certainly not archaic relics of the Silk Road. However, their lives do show how histories of connection forged through travel are interwoven in the social networks and abilities of itinerant people. From fur traders in London to Central Asian watchmakers in Kabul, these travellers possess skills acquired over generations. This expertise has enabled them to earn a living and social repute in multiple and often contrasting geopolitical contexts.
This chapter is based on data collected for the project ‘The Afterlives of Urban Muslim Asia: Alternative Imaginaries of Society and Polity’ (grant number AH/V004999/1) awarded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, whom I thank for their support.
This text was first published in the reader Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests (Berlin: HKW & Archive Books, 2025), 96–106. A German edition of the reader is also available.
[1] For a critical assessment, see Alexander Morrison, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[2] See Magnus Marsden, Beyond the Silk Road: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[3] See, for example, Connie Zondagh, Karakoel: Diamant of Matrys? (Windhoek: Eirup, 1990).
[4] Scott Levi, Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
[5] Khanikoff, Bokhara: Amir and Its People, trans. Baron Clement A. de Bode (London: James Madden, 1843), 212–13.
[6] R. D. McChesney, An Afghan Prince in Victorian England: Race, Class and Gender in an Afghan-Anglo Imperial Encounter (London: I. B. Tauris, 2024).
[7] Alexandre Vassiliev, Beauty in Exile: The Artists, Models and Nobility Who Fled the Russian Revolution and Influenced the World of Fashion (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).
[8] Patrick Berche, ‘The Enigma of the 1889 Russian Flu Pandemic: A Coronavirus?’, La Presse Médicale 51, no. 3 (2022),
[9] Magnus Marsden, ‘Adjusting Scales: Jewish Trading Networks in and beyond Afghanistan, 1950–Present-Day’, History and Anthropology (December 2023): 1–20.
[10] Brian Spooner, ‘Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 195–235.
[11] I met Hamidullah most recently between 10 and 18 October 2023 in the town in which he lives in Turkey. Following anthropological convention, in the following I use pseudonyms to refer to Hamidullah and his family members.
[12] For more detail, see Magnus Marsden, Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (London: Hurst and Co., 2016).