Afghanistan and the Coloniality of Diplomacy

This book offers an institutional history of the British Legation in Kabul, which was established in response to the independence of Afghanistan in 1919. It contextualises this diplomatic mission in the wider remit of Anglo-Afghan relations and diplomacy from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, examining the networks of family and profession that established the institution’s colonial foundations and its connections across South Asia and the Indian Ocean. The study presents the British Legation as a late imperial institution, which materialised colonialism's governmental practices in the age of independence. Ultimately, it demonstrates the continuation of asymmetries forged in the Anglo-Afghan encounter and shows how these were transformed into instances of diplomatic inequality in the realm of international relations. Approaching diplomacy through the themes of performance, the body and architecture, and in the context of knowledge transfers, this work offers new perspectives on international relations through a cultural history of diplomacy.

“This book is a valuable addition to the growing literature on Afghanistan’s entanglements with the British empire. … The book does a remarkable job at delineating the ways in which this diplomatic representation went to great lengths to fashion itself as a ,colonial project en miniature‘ along the model of British residencies … .” (Francesca Fuoli, H-Soz-Kult, hsozkult.de, May 21, 2021)

Maximilian Drephal lectures in the School of Politics and International Studies at Loughborough University, UK, and is Research Associate in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he has taught as Lecturer in International History. He has previously published in Modern Asian Studies and in the edited collection Sport and Diplomacy: Games within Games (2018).