Search results for ""Author Magnus Marsden""
C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers
Trading Worlds is an anthropological study of a little understood yet rapidly expanding global trading diaspora, namely the Afghan merchants of Afghanistan, Central Asia and Europe. It contests one-sided images that depict traders from this and other conflict regions as immoral profiteers, the cronies of warlords or international drug smugglers. It shows, rather, the active role these merchants play in an ever-more globalised political economy. Afghan merchants, the author demonstrates, forge and occupy critical eco- nomic niches, both at home and abroad: from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia, to the ports of the Black Sea; and in global cities such as Istanbul, Moscow and London, the traders' activities are shaping the material and cultural lives of the di- verse populations among whom they live. Through an exploration of the life histories, trading activities and everyday experiences of these mobile merchants, Magnus Marsden shows that traders' worlds are informed by complex forms of knowledge, skill, ethical sensibility, and long-lasting human relationships that often cut across and dissolve boundaries of nation, ethnicity, religion and ideology.
£30.00
C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd Fragments of the Afghan Frontier
Despite the long and intimate history of engagement along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan's North-West, this area and its relationship to the world remains poorly understood in the West's popular imagination. Through the construction of a collage of historical narratives and intense ethnographic encounters, Marsden and Hopkins argue that the simplistic stereotypes and tropes that all too often masquerade as knowledge about the Frontier not only conceal a more complex reality, but are also a source of the problems that local and international actors alike face there. Not some simple isolated depot of radical terrorists or instrumental tribesmen, the Frontier is a space of richly textured meaning, constructed through a history of movement of its inhabitants and their understanding of the world beyond. Fragments of the Afghan Frontier offers a corrective to simplistic understanding both of the region's history and its current realities, leaving the reader with a deeper understanding of the ever-evolving complexity of this globally significant region.
£45.00
