CAI | The Market of Fact and Fantasy: Brokering Afghanistan in Late Imperial Britain with Nile Green
The search for reliable news from Afghanistan posed a longstanding dilemma for the British Empire, which between 1839 and 1919 fought three wars based on rumors of Russian influence in Kabul. Over time, this informational predicament produced a system of ‘native informants,’ more often Indian than Afghan, to supply intelligence from the Afghan side of the Indian border. Given both the high stakes and the cost of war, information not only became monetized; it also became a manipulable social resource. Against this background, this lecture traces the career of one such informant, Ikbal Ali Shah, as he navigated the diversifying informational markets, both private and public, that opened in Britain with the Third-Anglo Afghan War. Amid the expanding mediascape of late empire, the lecture shows how the role of secret informant morphed into that of public spokesman, rendering authenticity an increasingly important measure of authority. Nile Green draws on his widely reviewed book, Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (Norton, 2024).
This event is sponsored by the Central Asia Initiative and The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund.
Speakers
Nile Green is Professor of History and Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA, where he holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History. He has BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Kings College London, Cambridge University, and SOAS.
His ten monographs include Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (Norton, 2024); How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale, 2022, which won the Bentley Prize in World History from the World History Association and was a Foreign Affairs Book of the Year); The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Princeton, 2015); Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 2012, which won the Albert Hourani Prize from the Middle East Studies Association and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association for Asian Studies); and Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction.
Green has edited or co-edited eight books and five journal special issues, including (as sole editor) The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (University of California Press, 2019); Afghan History through Afghan Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2016); ‘Big Asia’: Rethinking a Region, guest edited section of American Historical Review (June 2025); and Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka and the Islamic Indian Ocean (University of Texas Press, 2026). He has also published around a hundred peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.
Green has been awarded numerous fellowships and visiting positions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His writing is informed by more than thirty years of travel and research in India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Japan, Uzbekistan, Xinjiang, Syria, Yemen, and many other regions of Asia and Africa. To improve public understanding of the Muslim world, he hosts the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam.