Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter explores the insights that ethnography offers into understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. The first section argues that the anthropology of exchange, in which commerce is seen as a distinctive sphere of transaction, risks truncating our understanding of the relationship between commerce and ethics. The second section explores the relationships between trade, violence, and state power, noting that merchants often articulate ethical ideals as they negotiate these relationships. The third section discusses scholarship on long-distance trading networks and trust, and suggests that the category of ethics is most helpful when it is used to describe not the basis of trust but the ways in which merchants manage and confront mistrust: for example, how they conceive of tensions between sentiment and self-interest. The final section identifies four areas stimulated by attention to the ethical dimensions of commerce: the diverse notions of reputation and personhood that animate the conduct of trade; the ways in which merchants conceive of the relationship between commerce and systems of morality and negotiate moral dilemmas; the way that commerce is informed by vernacular notions of value, abundance, and prosperity; and the forms of self-making that traders pursue through commerce.

This chapter explores a second key human –commercial corridor that acts as a channel for a specific trading network. It explores the activities of traders who identify with adjacent regions of Afghanistan and Central Asia. These traders currently live and work in Istanbul and Jeddah. Afghan merchants of backgrounds very different from those discussed in the previous chapter bring together East Asia, the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey as a triangle. Going beyond the tendency in much scholarly work to fixate on the East –West connectivity of the ‘Silk Road’, the chapter explores these networks in relationship to the geographical scale of West Asia– a geographical concept points towards a geographical scale that is defined by specific characteristics and dynamics but that is also inherently part of Asia more generally. The distinctive nature of the networks described in this chapter is also an important reminder of diversity within the Eurasian arena as a whole and of the dangers of overly unitary attempts to conceptualise it. The trading networks involved in mediating these connections, furthermore, act pragmatically within the nation-state system at the same time as cultivating collective identities that do not revolve around one-dimensional belonging to Afghanistan.

This chapter’s focus is on an equally important and perhaps surprising aspect of the historically layered and cultural complex composition of trading networks– their religious diversity. Long-term conflict and displacement in Afghanistan has resulted in the bleaching of ‘ethno-religious minorities’ from the country’s social fabric, what is sometimes referred to as the process of ‘decosmopolitanisation’. This chapter argues that processes of ‘de-cosmopolitinisation’ are best understood alongside recognition of the persistence in new settings of the legacy of past modes of doing commerce widely documented in multi-religious Muslim-majority societies. It explore the role traders play in cultivating and maintaining nuanced modes of engaging with religious diversity in the various settings in which they work, exploring the afterlife of Afghanistan’s legacy of cosmopolitan modes of urban living in the geographies and sociality of contemporary forms of trade. In order to do so, the ethnographic focus of the chapter is on relationships between Muslim traders from Afghanistan and those who identify with the country’s historic and substantial– but today geographically dispersed– Hindu and Sikh communities.

The conclusion summarises the central arguments of the book, advances the notion of ‘navigational agency’ for understand the manner in which traders contend with the fraught geopolitical across which they lead their lives and make a living, and explores the possible futures of the informal networks that bind different parts of Eurasia to one another.

This chapter introduces the book’s central focus and argument and discusses the themes in relationship to which it is structured. Recent work on connectivity in Eurasia has focused upon the role played by international projects of development, notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Building on ethnographic work with informal traders active across Afghanistan, the book emphasises the importance of informal networks of trade and commerce to Eurasian connectivity. The longdistance trading networks it describes and analysed are historically layered, structured in diverse ways, and comprised of politically astute actors able to navigate the complex geopolitical worlds across which they work. Trust is important to the activities of such networks, but so too is the ability to withstand moments of mistrust.

This chapter documents and analyses the first of two major corridors of connectivity that shape and inform the forms of Afghan mobility that the book argues constitute a critical aspect of the connections that link different regions of Asian to one another. The corridor explored in the chapter (the Eurasian corridor) connects commercial nodes in post-Soviet Eurasia to China via the Muslim majority states of Central Asia. The chapter’s overarching aim is to describe and analyse the contours and structure of the networks that operate along this Eurasian corridor of connectivity, as well as the role played by nodes in the functioning and dynamics of these networks. It seeks to show the significance of the legacy of the geopolitical dynamics of the Soviet Union and Russia to the activities and identities of traders working along the Eurasian corridor.

This chapter focuses on a specific type of social institution that Afghan traders use to anchor their networks and maintain their trading activities in the Eurasian and West Asian corridors of connectivity: the restaurant. If the country’s moneylenders play a critical role in the economic development of Eurasian trading nodes, then its restaurateurs and cooks are active agents in the cultural aspects of inter-Asian commercial settings. Afghan restaurants are of critical importance to the transmission of shared sensibilities among traders identifying with the country and to complex forms of cross-cultural exchange and interaction that take place in fraught geopolitical contexts. A great deal of work has emphasised the importance of a shared ‘Muslim culture’ to the forms of connectivity being established along the so-called ‘New Silk Road’. This chapter argues that a wider pool of resources is of importance for Afghan modes of navigating across fraught geopolitical contexts and the contributions they make and leave in the settings in which they live.

This chapter considers the relationship of mobile Afghan traders to Afghanistan. It argues that commercial nodes within Afghanistan act as vital hubs that are rich in the types of capital and commercial personnel critical for long-distance Afghan networks of credit and trade. A consideration of the entangled trajectories of commercial actors and migrants also challenges the depiction of Afghanistan as a one-dimensional departure point for migrants. The country instead plays a central role in inter-Asian circulations of goods, capital and people and occupies a critical role in interconnected and multidirectional geographical trajectories of merchants and migrants. The chapter documents the importance of practices of entrustment and the giving of favours to mobile Afghan to the country significance to long-distance trading networks. Afghanistan’s trading networks and the nodes important to them inform development across Eurasia in settings where we might least expect them to do so. In this sense, tracing Afghan trading networks reveal connections between different parts of Eurasia– connections in which Afghans are themselves active in constructing.

This chapter focuses on a single specific node that is of significance for the activities of many of the traders discussed in this book– the Chinese international trade city of Yiwu. It documents differences in the expectations that Chinese policymakers and commodity traders have of Yiwu’s status as an inter-Asian commercial node. City planners in Yiwu have sought to enhance Ythe city’s international renown as a centre for the global trade in ‘small commodities’. Thousands of international traders working in Yiwu– including those from Afghanistan who are the focus of this book– have played an active and visible role in the city’s commercial dynamics since the mid-1990s in particular. Far from seeing Yiwu solely as a commercial infrastructure hub, however, the traders emphasise their emotional and cultural attachments to the city. The traders also believe that the manifold contributions they have made to Yiwu’s development entitles them to a settled place in the city’s future. The chapter explores the ways in which tensions between these two different perspectives on Yiwu’s status as an inter-Asian commercial node play out in in the traders’ experiences of daily life in the city.