Caravans in Global Perspective

Contexts and Boundaries

Persis B. Clarkson, Calogero M. Santoro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000504194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a fresh and unique global perspective on the study of caravans by bringing together a wealth of up-to-date research that explores the similarities and divergences of caravan lifeways in Africa, Eurasia, the Near East, Southwest Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. The volume presents theoretical frameworks for caravan assessment and intercultural caravan crossings, pushing the boundaries of caravan route history and archaeology to consider the emergence, evolution, maintenance, and adaptations of caravans. Drawing from anthropological, archaeological, historical, geographical, economic, social, political, and art historical perspectives, the volume will be attractive to scholars of these disciplines and beyond who are interested in social issues embedded on trade, travel, and nomadism.

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1 Early modern caravan networks in Afghanistan
A view from above

Kate Franklin and Emily Boak

DOI: 10.4324/9781003229810-1

Early modern caravan routes and conflict archaeology

This chapter takes advantage of the opportunity opened by new remotely sensed data on early modern (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries AD) caravan routes in the Republic of Afghanistan to review the nature and significance of caravan routes to early modern economies. This region and period are critical to a broader historical understanding of both aspects of interaction and trade in the early modern period, as well as of the consolidation of economic and political structures considered modern: state infrastructures, global trade companies, bulk commerce, and world-scale markets. Further, this relatively brief examination reinserts the territories of modern Afghanistan into the discussion of the early modern world. For half a century, ongoing conflict has prevented the country-scale archaeological investigation of Afghanistan. As a result, despite the routes of travel through Afghanistan being known from historical accounts, systematic assessments of early modern trade infrastructure tend to trail off at the modern border (e.g. Kleiss 2001:89). More critically, the importance of caravan route infrastructure for defining the material conditions of travel through this frontier region has been discounted in historical analysis (Franklin and Boak 2019).

As we will explore, the caravanserai network in Afghanistan demonstrates the infrastructural role of caravan routes in tying together the frontiers of early modern empires. In particular, the caravanserais of Afghanistan demonstrate a “meeting on the edge” by institutions of political economy developed within both the Safavid Persian empire (1501–1722) and the Mughal empire (1520s–1757).

Our discussion is informed by data generated during management and preservation research undertaken in the context of “conflict archaeology”, or the use of academic research and recording techniques to track and mitigate threats to archaeological heritage during periods of war. Conflict archaeology often involves a research paradox: the same conflict which limits on-the-ground investigations also, through the generation of cartography and remote surveillance by occupying forces (in this case the United States as well as prior actors like the Soviet Union and British Empire), enables regional-scale examinations of landscapes at the countrywide scale (Boak 2019). In addition to historical maps, we draw on the descriptions of travelers, from merchants and mercantile agents to the agents of the British Afghan Boundary Commission, who described both sites and routes in the course of their explorations (e.g., Adamec 1980; Ker Porter 1821; Kinneir 1813; Yate 1887, 1888). In our broader discussion of the Afghan and early modern routes we are reliant on data sources which are each in their own way “remote”: satellite and aerial imagery on the one hand, and the accounts of early modern and modern travelers on the other. Combined, they contribute to a brief introduction to the politics, mechanics, and cultures of caravans in early modern Central Asia.

Geographic introduction to Afghanistan

This chapter focuses on early modern trade routes through the territory of the modern Republic of Afghanistan. Our data was generated as part of the Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership (AHMP) at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, a remote-sensing project focused on compiling site data across Afghanistan for the purposes of monitoring and management. The AHMP is a collaboration between the Oriental Institute and various institutions in Afghanistan including the Afghan Institute of Archaeology and Kabul Polytechnic University. The project is centered on the digitization of archaeological sites and landscapes through techniques of remote survey developed specifically for Afghanistan (Thomas and Kidd 2017). Our methodologies and data sets developed with a dual purpose, both to systematically record sites and also to construct tools for targeted research into Afghanistan’s rich archaeological past (Franklin and Hammer 2018). The past half century of ongoing armed conflict in Afghanistan has had a deleterious effect on archaeological research, both through the acute destruction of sites, monuments, and museum collections as well as by drawing an arbitrary barrier to research across Central Asian landscapes which were contiguous in the past. (Figure 1.1)

Figure 1.1 A map of the research area (the territory of modern Afghanistan is highlighted) showing the reconstructed routes of several early modern travelers, and sites mentioned in the chapter.

The core of Afghanistan is mountains: the jagged Hindu Kush form a highland center to the country and run northeast to meet the western Himalayas. These mountains divide Afghanistan into regions, each of which has through history been connected by river valleys, desert roads, or mountain passes to neighboring areas. This has led to a multipolarity in the geopolitical and cultural history of the region, as well as in a long record of mobility along the routes through Afghanistan’s mountains and deserts. While some of these routes are topographic constants (such as the Khyber Pass, for example), the directionality of trade through Afghanistan has shifted through history according to changing geopolitics.

Afghanistan has been noted as a crossroads since at least the Hellenistic period, when the Greco Bactrian kingdom was centered in the oases to the north (Baumer 2012:285–292). In this period Afghanistan was a crossroads of steppe, Iranian, South Asian, and Greek material cultures and artistic tastes, as evidenced in hybrid objects like those from the grave assemblage at Tillya Tepe (Sarianidi 1980:131), or the sculptural repertoires at Hadda in Nangarhar province. Likewise, the city of Farah, located on the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau, had been an entrepôt since the time of Alexander (Ferrier et al. 1856: 392). An art historical study of the medieval period has ably demonstrated the play of cultural influences between Islamic cities and the Hindu subcontinent, mediated by polities of what is now southern and central Afghanistan (Flood 2009). In the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, nomadic invasions reconfigured the cultural world of Central Asia, and trade shifted around Ghurid, Mongol, and Timurid cities including Herat, Kandahar, Balkh, and Kabul (Thomas 2018). The earliest remaining travel infrastructure in Afghanistan dates from this period (Pugachenkova 1970:45–49). The development of caravan routes and route infrastructure to support late medieval trade presaged the use of these same travel landscapes for large-scale caravan commerce in subsequent centuries.

Early modern Central Asia: the Safavid and Mughal empires

The early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in Central Asia was shaped by the expansion of Muslim empires, which influenced urban and regional life across the continent in terms of political and social institutions, traditions of power, and material and visual aesthetics. Hodgson famously categorized the Mughal empire of India and Pakistan, the Safavid Persian empire, and the Ottoman Turkish empire as “gunpowder” empires (Hodgson 1974:16), essentially attributing what he saw as a sixteenth-century florescence of new forms of social life and state power to the technical reorganization of military hierarchies. Subsequent scholars have pointed out that this term overstates the similarity between these polities as historical and social phenomena (Streusand 2010:3). Beyond the synchronicity of the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman empires within the “gunpowder era” (a term which itself implies a transformative effect on global social orders which is debatably merited by a single technology), these polities also shared Turkic-Mongol traditions of governance, ideas of rulership, and grammars of spatial and aesthetic order. Among the shared social institutions of early modern Central Asia is a commitment at the aristocratic, royal, or state level to institutions of hospitality; this institution overlapped in the early modern period with a state commitment to the fostering of trade. We will focus for the remainder of this chapter on Safavid and Mughal examples (being most pertinent to Afghanistan), but the expansion of all three of the early modern Islamic empires involved the construction of hospitable institutions for travelers and infrastructure for traders and their goods: hospices, hostels, and caravan inns, known most commonly as (k)hans (Ottoman Turkish, “inn”), caravanserais (Persian, “caravan hall”), or as sarays (Hindi “inn”, Urdu “hall or palace”) in the Mughal context. Caravanserais, as we shall explore, are both one of the most prominent physical monuments to the early modern Islamic empires, as well as symbolic of the more complex and spatio-temporally entangled institutions of hospitality, sovereignty, and political economy which united Central Asia as a social ecumene for multiple centuries of the medieval and early modern periods.

Architecture of early modern caravanserais in Central Asia

The caravanserai has a long institutional tradition in Eurasia, building from multiple intersecting traditions of infrastructure and hospitality, including the Greek pandocheion (guest house) and royal roads networks built by the Achaemenids (Constable 2003). The canonical form of the Central Asian caravanserai, with a monumental entrance leading to a broad courtyard lined with rooms, was developed under the Karakhanid khaganates in the tenth to eleventh centuries; at the same time, the caravanserai as an institution of hospitality was cemented within narratives of Islamic politics (Franklin 2014a and b; Hillenbrand 1994:331–376). The twelfth to thirteenth centuries saw an explosion of caravan networks from the Mediterranean coast under the Mamluks, to Seljuk Anatolia, across the Caucasus and through the Mongol khanates, as major geopolitical changes united people from northwestern Europe to China in common cultures, from cuisine to religion (Cytryn-Silverman 2010; Tavernari 2017). These connections and routes would shift and expand still further in the early modern period, with the development of maritime trading companies and the consolidation of the “gunpowder empires”. Siroux described the Safavid practice of modifying earlier Seljuk and Mongol caravanserais elsewhere in the empire (Siroux 1974:351). The corpus of caravanserais built under the Safavids has been painstakingly collated by Wolfram Kleiss; his series of volumes categorize these structures as variations around a standard model. Built from stone or (more frequently in Central Asia) from mudbrick, the Safavid caravanserai was square with a central courtyard, with iwan entrances and internal rooms arranged to strict axial symmetry. Some caravanserais feature corner towers or bastions. Mughal sarays were built to very similar specifications; monumental stone or brick gates opened into a central courtyard, leading to a series of chambers for the storage of goods and the accommodation of human travelers and their animals (Campbell 2011). In both empires, caravanserais on major routes were equipped with stately chambers over the main gate, where traveling kings or nobles would stay. These buildings would also frequently feature inscriptions indicating to whose glory the enjoyment of the facilities ought to be attributed, whether a king or a local administrator.

Trade patronage of the Safavid and Mughal empires

The place of trans-continental caravan trade within the political economy of the Safavid and Mughal empires is an ongoing subject of active research and debate. While the contributions of these empires to the global economy in the early modern period is unquestionable, the relationships between trade policy and political philosophy, or between tactics of revenue collection and traditions of hospitality, are not always clear. Rudi Matthee argued that a large cohort of western economic historians have treated Safavid Iran

as a giant clearing house through which a considerable volume of trade passed on its way to somewhere else following the seventeenth-century French cleric du Mans, who compared Iran to a caravanserai with one gate open to Turkey and another to India.

(Matthee 1999:3)

Beyond encapsulating the perception of Safavid Iran as a passive “transit” economy, this conceptualization also echoes rhetorics of the state that were native to early modern Islamic empires, though with different connotations. An inscription of Shah Abbas I (ruled 1588–1629) at the Kashan caravanserai begins, “The world is a caravanserai and we are the caravan” (translated from Chardin 1811:(III):3). Rather than a metaphor for political economy, this inscription (drawing on longer traditions of political thought and writing in Central Asia) frames the caravanserai in cosmological terms, as a microcosm ruled over by the benevolent will of the Shah. A broader epigraphic tradition linking the construction of caravanserais “as wide as the heavens” to the will and memory of a royal or princely patron is found in the Mughal empire as well, tying that empire to hospitable politics across Eurasia (Campbell 2011:65; Cunningham 1882:64; Franklin 2014a). Even as the early modern period saw the appearance of “modern” innovations in trade, the practices of caravan travel through which trade was realized in Eurasia were literally contained within political cosmologies with longer traditions, mediated through built spaces like caravanserais.

The Silk Road during the early modern period

The focus of most history of early modern trade in Central Asia has been on the commodities traded; these objects and substances are admittedly critical to understanding the geographies of taste and desire that were constituted through the long-distance movement of people and animals in this period. Caravans carried a combination of goods, both things that we would now consider “bulk goods” as well as exotic “luxuries”. Durable goods like ceramic dishes, tiles, and furnishings were carrie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Early modern caravan networks in Afghanistan: A view from above
• 2 Travel times versus transport costs on Maya rivers
• 3 Assessing human mobility and dietary patterns in the Atacama Desert using stable isotopes: the Tarapacá case: (AD 900–1450)
• 4 Historic caravans in Tanzania: Toward reinvigorating multidisciplinary exploration
• 5 From northwestern Argentina to the Atacama Desert: Circulation, goods, and value (900 BC–AD 400)
• 6 Wari state control of camelid caravan traffic between the coast and highlands of the southern Nasca region, Peru
• 7 Caravans and long-distance trade in Roman Egypt
• 8 The overland ’Great Silk Road’: Myths and realities (A politically incorrect paper on a politically correct subject)
• 9 Birth and growth of medieval trans-Saharan trade in West Africa: The example of the Caravan City of Sijilmasa (Morocco)
• 10 Caravanner and herder-horticulturalist connections on an Atacama Desert trafficking route AD 950–1450
• 11 Maritime trails: The sea route from the Mediterranean to China in precolonial times
• 12 Neither caravanners nor herders: Participation by the coastal and lowland peoples in the caravan network of the northern Atacama Desert, Chile, AD 1000–1535
• 13 Human caravans of Mesoamerica
• Index