A Political and Diplomatic History of Afghanistan

This political and diplomatic history of late nineteenth-century Afghanistan and its major ethnic groups lays bare how the ground was laid for the emergence of Afghanistan as a nation-state as well as for the implementation of schemes of modernization. It describes how Amir Sher ‘Ali Khan and, more fully, Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan for the first time consolidated the authority of the central government at the expense of the traditional autonomous local magnates, and thus managed to organize a centralized monarchical state and extend its direct rule