Astrakhan, Borqa', Chadari, Dreshi: The Economy of Dress in Early 20th Century Afghanistan In 1929, Amanullah Khan, the ‘modernizing’ young Emir of Afghanistan, was forced to flee his country after a violent uprising erupted in different areas of the country. This uprising has traditionally been viewed as a reactionary conservative reaction to Amanullah’s overly progressive reform project. At the centre of this project was gender reform: equal rights for women in terms of education, jobs, property ownership, and the outlawing of ‘traditional’ practices such as under-age marriage, polygamy, and the veiling of women. The paper returns to this pivotal moment in Afghan history in order to re-appraise the role of “the veil” in the transformations of the 1920s and the uprisings of 1929. It uses an interpretive model one might call Afghanistan’s “economy of dress”, which provides a means to analyze holistically interactions between the “production” and “consumption” of forms of dress amongst Afghans – both women and men - from different socio-economic backgrounds. Such an approach encourages a new interpretation of the period. While it has become commonplace to view the 1920s as marking a radical break with Afghanistan’s past, this paper emphasizes the continuities. Moreover, changes in women’s status and dress must be seen in the context of larger-scale material and cultural changes in the late 19th century and early 20th century rather than as the product of the radical intervention of a few Afghan pioneers. When the paper turns to the uprisings of 1928, its approach again offers a new reading. Using never before studied sources in Turkish, Urdu, Dari, Pashto and Bengali, the paper argues that while there is no doubt that Amanullah did push for an increasingly ideologically-driven and unrealistic reform programme covering many aspects of Afghan life, there was in fact never an implemented “anti-veiling campaign.” At the same time, however, there really was a significant campaign of dress reforms aimed at men in Kabul, which became the source of more practical and less ideological concerns to an increasingly beleaguered population. The paper ends with a reappraisal of opposition to Amanullah’s regime, attempting to solve the riddle of why Amanullah’s promotion of “unveiling” (raf’-e hejab) became one of, perhaps the, most vociferously protested of all Amanullah’s reforms. And this despite the fact that no actual law about “unveiling” was ever implemented.