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¹⁹ For a discussion of the personalities involved in these aspects of Afghanistan's intra-socialist factional politics during these years, see Edwards, David, Before Taliban, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002Google Scholar.

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³² Humphrey, Caroline, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002Google Scholar.

³³ Tagliacozzo, ‘A Sino-Southeast Asian Circuit’, p. 447.

³⁴ Ibid. For a comparative study of the ways in which enterprising immigrant traders benefited from a period of violent political instability yet, due to their economic success, were also victims of anti-foreign sentiment, see Alfaro-Velcamp, , So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007Google Scholar.

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³⁷ Kuran, Timur, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 267Google Scholar. Incumbency advantage has also been used to explain the success of other trading diasporas, e.g. H. L. van der Laan, The Lebanese Traders in Sierra Leone, The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1975, p. 115.

³⁸ Lovejoy, Paul, ‘Ports of Trade: Salaga and Kano in the Nineteenth Century’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 16:2, 1982, pp. 245–77, p. 277Google Scholar.

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⁴⁰ One such trader, for instance, traded in goods between Odessa and Crimea in the spring of 2014 during Ukraine's conflict with Russia.

⁴¹ The extent to which such markets are exclusively ethnically Afghan varies, but they are frequently known to local populations as such. In some locations, such as Khujand in Tajikistan, traders in the Afghan bazaar are now predominantly local merchants. Elsewhere, such as in the ‘Klasik’ market in Rostov-on-Don, the ‘Sevastopol’ trading centre in Moscow, and the ‘Apraksin Dvor’ market in St Petersburg, the majority of retail shops and wholesale trading offices are Afghan-owned, though often staffed by employees from Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

⁴² R. Safronov (2001), ‘Turkmen's Marriage Decree Helps Deepen the Isolation of Citizens’, Eurasia Insight, 18 June 2001: (http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav061901.shtml, [accessed 27 February 2015].

⁴³ See, for example, Kalinovsky, Artemy, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ramazani, R. K., ‘Afghanistan and the USSR’, Middle East Journal, vol. 12:2, 1958, pp. 144–52Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Pliez, Olivier, ‘Following the New Silk Road between Yiwu and Cairo’, in Mathews, Gordon, Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins, and Vega, Carlos Alba (eds), Globalization from Below: The World's Other Economy, London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 19–35Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ See Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye. It is certainly the case that some of the traders in this space today do build on the expertise and knowledge of family members who were traders in the Soviet Union. I have found it hard to empirically ascertain the extent to which these specific networks of traders build on those that pre-date the twentieth century. It is usual, though, for some of my informants to conjecture that Afghans were pioneers in the long-distance trade of goods between China and Russia in the twentieth century because of their historic involvement in such practices in earlier generations. Further research on the historic continuities and shifts in these trading networks is therefore required.

⁴⁶ Reeves, Madeleine, ‘Unstable Objects: Corpses, Checkpoints and Chessboard Borders in the Ferghana Valley’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, vol. 25:1, 2005, pp. 72–84Google Scholar.

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⁴⁸ On marriage legislation in the United Arab Emirates, compare Dresch, Paul, ‘Debates on Marriage and Nationality in the United Arab Emirates’, in Dresch, Paul (ed.), Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, London: I. B.Tauris, 2005, pp. 136–57Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ See, for example, Alfaro Velcamp, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico; Arsan, Interlopers of Empire; Clarence-Smith, ‘Hadhrami Entrepreneurs in the Malay World, c1750–c1940’.

⁵⁰ Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life, pp. 96–97.

⁵¹ See for example, Markovitz, The Global World of Indian Merchants; Anthony-Falzon, Mark, Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora, 1860–2000, Leiden: Brill, 2004Google Scholar.

⁵² Aslanian rejects the model of the apolitical ‘trade diaspora’ in his historical study of Armenian merchants on the grounds that ‘trade and politics mixed’ in this and many other trading networks. See Aslanian, David Sebouh, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014, p. 11Google Scholar.

⁵³ Levinson, Marc, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ There is an excellent body of anthropological literature concerned with the distinction between the legal and the licit, and the relationship of this to trade and commodity types. See for example, van Schendel, Wilhelm and Abrahams, Itty, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other side of Globalization, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005Google Scholar; Aguiar, José Carlos, ‘Smugglers, Fayuqueros, Piratas: Transitory Commodities and Illegality in the Trade of Pirated CDs in Mexico’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, vol. 36:2, 2013, pp. 249–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aguiar, José Carlos, ‘“They Come from China”: Pirate CDs in Mexico in Transnational Perspective’, in Mathews, G., Ribeiro, G. Lins, and Vega, C. Alba (eds), Globalization from Below: The World's Other Economy, London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 36–54Google Scholar.

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⁶² Chang, W-C., ‘From a Shiji Episode to the Forbidden Jade Trade During the Socialist Regime in Burma’, in Tagliacozzo, Eric and Chang, W-C. (eds), Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 455–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Gambetta, Diego, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 206–7Google Scholar.

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⁶⁵ See Raussing, Sigrid, ‘Re-Constructing the “Normal”: Identity and the Consumption of Western Goods in Estonia’, in Mandel, R. and Humphrey, C. (eds), Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism, London: Berg, 2002, pp. 127–42Google Scholar; and Humphrey, Caroline, ‘Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times’, in Miller, D. (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ASA Decennial Conference Series, London: Routledge, 1995Google Scholar.

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⁶⁷ Petersen, Mark Allen, Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011, p. 174Google Scholar.

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