James Madison University

“Afghanistan as Intellectual Capital in Anglo-American Imperial Knowledge Formations:  Comparing Mountstuart Elphinstone’s Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan”

This paper elaborates upon recent consideration of Mounstuart Elphinstone’s An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815, hereafter AKC) using Book History as a mode of comparison.  The means of comparison pairs AKC with Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan (1973; hereafter LDA).  A book history comparison of AKC and LDA reveals both conspicuous similarities and stark contrasts.  This comparative essay will focus on book structure and visual accoutrements to narrative and para-narrative elements of each text.  The structural comparison of AKC and LDA will focus on para-narrative elements including Prefaces, Epilogues, Appendices and Referenced Materials.  The visual comparison will address Portraits and Profiles, but the emphasis will be on the maps in AKC and LDA.  The personal biographies and professional careers of Elphinstone and Dupree will introduce the exercise in comparative textual analysis.  The biographical comparison will focus on military career paths, institutional connections, professional relations, and personal informants and translators.  The use of book history as mode of textual comparison will be complemented by engagement of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of social capital as a mechanism for comparing the careers of Mounstuart Elphinstone and Louis Dupree.

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is a Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian History at James Madison University in Virginia, USA. Hanifi’s Ph.D. Thesis from the University of Michigan formed the basis of a Gutenberg-e Prize from the American Historical Association that resulted in his first book, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (2008, 2011). Hanifi’s research and publications have addressed subjects including colonial political economy, the history of printing, the Pashto language, cartography, photography, animal and environmental studies in Afghanistan. His primary current project is a conference and publication series focusing on the early nineteenth-century British Indian scholar-administrator Mounstuart Elphinstone. Hanifi served as the Treasurer of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies from 2003-2015, and he currently serves as Trustee of the American Institute of Indian Studies and on the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. In addition to the AHA, Hanifi has received research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Asian Development Bank, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

​