Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a longue duree history of Hindu Kush mountain forests. It considers changing patterns of timber use among local communities, national authorities and imperial powers within and across pre-modern and modern borders.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a longue duree history of Hindu Kush mountain forests. It considers changing patterns of timber use among local communities, national authorities and imperial powers within and across pre-modern and modern borders. The presentation begins with brief surveys of a.) wood use in ancient, classical and pre-modern historiography of the Hindu Kush region, focusing on war and imperial architecture, and b.) forests and timber in the ethnography of Hindu Kush mountain cultures, highlighting culinary, musical and agricultural technologies and vernacular architecture. The early modern period is addressed through the memoires of the Mughal Empire’s founder, Babur, who spent the years 1504-20 in the Hindu Kush where his attuned sense of this mountain environment includes extensive commentary on trees and their products. A comparative discussion of Afghan national and British colonial engagement of Hindu Kush forests during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is organized around contrasting approaches to the institutionalization of forest knowledge and commoditization of forest products. The contemporary post-1978 period focuses on the multiple deleterious impacts of global war on the Hindu Kush forest ecosystems. The paper concludes with attention state policies concerning the impact of climate change on local communities in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan and Pakistan.