The City of Balkh and the Caravan Trade of Nineteenth-Century Central Eurasia It is commonly claimed that following the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and with the rise of the newly discovered sea routes of the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth-century, the Central Eurasian overland traffic commonly referred to as the Silk Road was eclipsed, falling into ruin in the steppes. However, nineteenth-century Persian and European sources on Afghanistan and Central Eurasia paint a different picture of a steppe world still connected by networks of trade, travel, and pilgrimage. The Afghan city of Balkh was an important entrepot in the early modern Central Eurasian world. Lying on the frontier between the steppe and the sown, Balkh was situated at the intersection of caravan routes leading to India in the south, to Iran in the West, and to China in the East. Within the gates of Balkh, merchants, pilgrims, pastoral nomadic and settled populations were brought together in economic and cultural exchanges. The Central Eurasian caravan trade in horses, silk, and silver, the movements of the nomadic Turkmen tribes, and the pilgrimages of the disciples of the Naqshbandiya Sufi brotherhood reached the city’s caravanserais, bazaars, shrines, and hinterland. Balkh, once known as the “Mother of Cities” (Umm al-Balad), remained a viable outpost on the edge of the steppe and the sown until its environs grew swampy and repeated outbreaks of cholera in the mid-nineteenth century led to the abandonment of the city in favor of the nearby Mazar-i Sharif. With rare exceptions, the existing literature on modern Afghanistan and Central Eurasia has privileged political narratives and has been written from the narrow perspective of the nation-state. The prevailing scholarship, largely a product of Russian and Soviet historiography, has offered only a fragmented view of the Afghan and Central Eurasian past and neglected the indigenous Persianate sources for its study. Based on Persianate travel narratives and geographical histories, as well as archival sources, this paper examines the position of the city of Balkh in the networks of caravan trade that integrated the steppe and the sown in early nineteenth-century Central Eurasia.