Fayz Muhammad’s Siraj al-Tawarikh (ST) is arguably the most important locally produced Persian language source for the modern history of Afghanistan. ST has been examined most often as an artifact of Afghan state history, particularly Durrani dynastic historical chronicling. This paper provides a reading of ST beyond the parameters of nationalist historiography to address global history generally and the intersections between the global histories of capitalism and local environmental histories in the Middle East and Persianate world, specifically. The essay interrogates ST with questions about the relationship between European capital and the environmental history of Afghanistan in mind for the years c. 1880-1920. The first part of the essay will outline the presence of the European actors who received concessions or contracts from the Afghan state for the export and import of commodities, primarily, but also for various other tasks involving the transfer of industrial technologies, engineering skills, medical and other sciences. The scientific and commercial imports representing European capital and technology were concentrated primarily in the government workshops in Kabul, but also at various locations within the organizational matrix of the state-operated commercial monopolies over export commodities such as timber that imbricated global capital in local agricultural production and animal farms, vineyards, forests and mines throughout the country. The second part of the paper considers ST’s attention to the primary site of capital concentration in Afghanistan, the aforementioned workshops in Kabul known as the mashin khana. The foci here will be the division of labor within and the products of the workshop complex. Recently acquired archival photographs of the mashin khana will be used to argue that the workshops represent the Afghan state’s quest to transition through manufacturing to an industrial phase of production as rapidly as possible. Energy supply, specifically wood for steam manufacturing and electricity for industry, is pursued in the third part of the paper. It will address ST’s treatment of the forests and rivers of Afghanistan, particularly the government timber monopoly and state projects involving river damming, diversion and hydroelectricity. Animal transport labor is considered here via ST’s attention to the domestic camels used to transport wood and the imported elephants used to transport industrial machinery to the mashin khana and other industrial sites where European capital and technology accumulated in the country during the two decades before and after 1900.