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This chapter considers how the Anglo-Saxon chronicles (ninth to twelfth century) depict three waves of migration: the coming of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, the Viking invasions, and the Norman Conquest. By focusing on the form and language of the texts, the chapter shows that the chronicles were not only preoccupied by migration as one of its central themes but were themselves deeply shaped by the literary cultures brought to England by immigrants, whether they came as conquerors or as learned clerical advisors. The result is a set of texts whose account of the origins of the English reveals the wide European horizons of their literary culture.

In this afterword chapter, Farzin Vejdani places the common themes that emerge from the eight Afghan case studies into a wider regional context, so refuting the common proposition that Afghanistan has always pursued its own unique Sonderweg. Ending with this regional perspective reinforces one of the central themes of both Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes and its companion volume, Afghanistan in Ink: that modern Afghan history can only be understood through the recognition of cross-border networks, dialogical developments and deep regional dynamics.

Christine Noelle-Karimi analyzes two Persian histories written during the early Durrani period by Mahmud al-Husayni of Mashhad (in present-day Iran) and Imam al-Din Husayni of Lahore (in present-day Pakistan). Rather than presenting the Durrani Empire as a forerunner to the Afghan nation-state, Noelle-Karimi situates its historians in their own spatial horizons by showing how the historiography of the Durrani Empire emerged out of the political and literary geographies of the earlier Iranian and Indian empires from which Durrani power had itself emerged.

By focusing on the Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi of the aforementioned Mahmud al-Husayni, in Chapter 2 Amin Tarzi presents a powerfully revisionist reading of this “first history of Afghanistan”. By working through the way in which the Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi explained Ahmad Shah Durrani’s rise to power, his relationship with his former sovereign, the Iranian Nadir Shah Afshar and the motivations for the change of his dynastic title from Abdali to Durrani, Tarzi reconstructs the political self-conceptions of the early Durrani state. Having done so, Tarzi then looks ahead to give a critical assessment of the effects that this Durrani political economy had on the future contours of the Afghan state.

In Chapter 3 Robert D. McChesney provides a biographical study of the figure widely regarded as Afghanistan’s last traditional and first modern historian: Fayz Muhammad Katib. By meticulously reconstructing Fayz Muhammad’s working life as a court historian, McChesney shows the fraught political (and financial) conditions in which historical writing was produced in early-twentieth-century Afghanistan while at the same time providing a contextualization of Fayz Muhammad’s magisterial modern Afghan history book, Siraj al-Tawarikh.

Chapter 6 takes up the dynamic fusion of ideas between the French archaeologists and the nationalizing historians who from the 1930s constructed startlingly different models of the “who and where” of Afghanistan. In this rich survey of Afghan historical writing between the 1930s and 1980s, Senzil Nawid charts the rise of antiquarianism, Aryanism, liberalism and finally socialism that shaped five dynamic decades of debate among the Afghan intelligentsia who had emerged by the mid-century through the educational projects of earlier decades. The chapter examines the first professional Afghan historical organizations, such as the Afghan Historical Society, along with its members, journals, and ideological positions.

By way of analysis of a 1971 Introduction (Dibacha) to the eighteenth-century Tawarikh-i Hafiz Rahmat Khani written by the Director of the University of Peshawar’s Pashto Academy, in Chapter 7 Robert Nichols thus examines the treatment of the Afghan past in a Pakistani context of ethnic and regional nationalism that, unlike in Afghanistan, was marginalized by the state. The chapter forms a very rare case study of a Pashto language historical work to assess the historical self-perceptions of Pashtuns between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Chapter 8 turns to the oral historiography of the Uzbeks of northern Afghanistan as recorded in the early twenty-first century. In a powerful parting reminder of the partisan qualities of historical writing, Ingeborg Baldauf distinguishes written history from memory to show how Afghan Uzbeks remember their past as one of oppression by the ruling powers and their local ethnic affiliates. By finally focusing on narratives of migration into Afghanistan across the Amu Darya river, and the fraught sense of belonging they imply, these stories from the porous borders of Afghanistan remind us that the “who” and “where” of Afghan history are still very much in debate.