From pedlar to industrial pioneer and back: a Jewish merchant in modernising Afghanistan, 1920s–1940s

This article examines the career of Mūsā Gul, a Jewish merchant from Herat, to understand how Afghanistan’s economic modernisation in the first half of the twentieth century transformed the commercial position of Jewish merchants. It traces his path from itinerant trader ( maḥalla-gard ) to one of the most prominent Jewish entrepreneurs in Afghanistan—participating in state-sponsored companies, establishing the country’s first private industrial complex in Mazar-i Sharif, and advising the state on monetary policy—and his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to secure state support for large-scale industrial projects in the 1930s. Drawing on previously unexplored documents from the National Archives of Afghanistan, oral histories, and printed sources, the article argues that his marginalisation resulted not from any single cause but from the convergence of imperial legacies, nationalist economic reform, and local resistance, which gradually narrowed the space available to minority merchants within Afghanistan’s modernising economy. Mūsā Gul’s career is examined as a case study in how structural processes—imperial, economic, and nationalist—intersected to reshape the commercial position of a minority community.