What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

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.