Advancing from Kashmir in 1818, Dōst Moḥammad, younger brother of Fatḥ Khan, took Peshawar and Kabul and drove Shah Maḥmūd and Kāmrān from all their possessions except Herāt, where they maintained a precarious footing for a few years. Balkh was seized by the ruler of Bukhara; the trans-Indus Afghan districts were occupied by the Sikhs; and the outlying provinces of Sind and Baluchistan assumed independence. Ghazna, Kabul, and Jalālābād fell to Dōst Moḥammad.

Dōst Moḥammad established the Bārakzay (or Moḥammadzay) dynasty. His position secure after he assumed the title of emir in 1826 at Kabul, he decided to recover Peshawar from the Sikhs. Declaring a jihad, or Islamic holy war, in 1836, he advanced on Peshawar. The Sikh leader Ranjit Singh, however, sowed dissension in Dōst Moḥammad’s camp, the invading army melted away, and Peshawar was lost to the Afghans.

In November 1837 Moḥammad Shah of Persia laid siege to Herāt, which the British saw as the key to India. The Russians supported the Persians. The British, fearful that Persia was falling completely under Russian influence, entered into alliances with the rulers of Herāt, Kabul, and Kandahār. A British mission to Kabul under Captain (later Sir) Alexander Burnes in 1837 was welcomed by Dōst Moḥammad, who hoped the British would help him recover Peshawar. Burnes could not give him the required assurances; and when a Russian agent appeared in Kabul, the British left for India.

With the failure of Burnes’s mission, the governor-general of India, Lord Auckland, ordered an invasion of Afghanistan, with the object of restoring Shah Shojāʿ to the throne. In April 1839, after suffering great privations, the British army entered Kandahār; Shojāʿ was then crowned shah. Ghazna was captured in the following July, and in August Shah Shojāʿ was installed at Kabul. The Afghans, however, would tolerate neither a foreign occupation nor a king imposed on them by a foreign power, and insurrections broke out. Dōst Moḥammad—who had escaped first to Balkh, then to Bukhara, where he was arrested—escaped from prison and returned to Afghanistan to lead his partisans against the British. In a battle at Parwan on November 2, 1840, Dōst Moḥammad had the upper hand, but the next day he surrendered to the British in Kabul. He was deported to India with the greater part of his family.

Outbreaks continued throughout the country, and the British eventually found their position untenable. Terms for their withdrawal were discussed with Akbar Khan, Dōst Moḥammad’s son, but Sir William Hay Macnaghten, the British political agent, was killed during a parley with the Afghans. On January 6, 1842, some 4,500 British and Indian troops, with 12,000 camp followers, marched out of Kabul. Bands of Afghans swarmed around them, and the retreat ended in a bloodbath. Shah Shojāʿ was killed after the British left Kabul.

Though in the summer of that same year British forces reoccupied Kabul, the new governor-general, Lord Ellenborough, decided on the evacuation of Afghanistan. In 1843 Dōst Moḥammad returned to Kabul. During the next 20 years he consolidated his rule by occupying Kandahār (1855), Balkh and the northern Khanates (1859), and Herāt (1863), the last less than a month before his death in June.

Shīr ʿAlī (1863–66; 1868–79)

Shīr ʿAlī Khan, Dōst Moḥammad’s third son, then became emir, but his two elder brothers took the throne from him in May 1866. Shīr ʿAlī regained his throne in September 1868. Shīr ʿAlī’s reception of a Russian mission at Kabul and his refusal to receive a British one, on British terms, led directly to the war of 1878–80. Shīr ʿAlī, leaving his son, Yaʿqūb Khan, as his regent in Kabul, sought help from the Russians, but they advised him to make peace. Shīr ʿAlī died in Mazār-e Sharīf in 1879.

Yaʿqūb Khan (1879)

The Treaty of Gandamak (Gandomak; May 26, 1879) recognized Yaʿqūb Khan as emir, and he subsequently agreed to receive a permanent British embassy at Kabul. In addition, he agreed to conduct his foreign relations with other states in accordance “with the wishes and advice” of the British government. This British triumph, however, was short-lived. On September 3, 1879, the British envoy and his escort were murdered in Kabul. British forces were again dispatched, and before the end of October they occupied Kabul. Yaʿqūb abdicated and was given exile in India, where he died in 1923.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khan (1880–1901)

The British finally withdrew from Kandahār in April 1881. In 1880 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khan, a cousin of Shīr ʿAlī, had returned from exile in Central Asia and proclaimed himself emir of Kabul. During the reign of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, the boundaries of modern Afghanistan were drawn by the British and the Russians. The Durand Line of 1893 divided zones of responsibility for the maintenance of law and order between British India and the kingdom of Afghanistan; it was never intended as a de jure international boundary. Afghanistan, therefore, although never dominated by a European imperial government, became a buffer between tsarist Russia and British India.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān exerted his influence, if not actual control, over the various ethnolinguistic groups inside Afghanistan, fighting some 20 small wars to convince them that a strong central government existed in Kabul. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was so successful that, at his death, his designated successor and eldest son, Ḥabībullāh Khan, succeeded to the throne as Ḥabībullāh I without the usual fratricidal fighting. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān can be considered the founder of modern Afghanistan.

Ḥabībullāh Khan (1901–19)

The introduction of modern European technology begun by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was furthered by Ḥabībullāh. Western ideals and styles penetrated the Afghan royal court and upper classes. An Afghan nationalist, Maḥmūd Beg Ṭarzī, published (1911–18) the periodical Serāj al-Akbār (“Torch of the News”), which had political influence far beyond the boundaries of Afghanistan.

Ḥabībullāh Khan visited British India in 1907 as a guest of the viceroy of India, Gilbert Elliot, 4th earl of Minto. Impressed with British power, Ḥabībullāh resisted pressures from Ṭarzī, Amānullāh (Ḥabībullāh’s third son, who had married Soraya, a daughter of Ṭarzī), and others to enter World War I on the side of the Central Powers. The peace ending World War I brought death to Ḥabībullāh—he was murdered on February 20, 1919, by persons associated with the anti-British movement—and Amānullāh seized power.

Amānullāh (1919–29)

Amānullāh launched the inconclusive Third Anglo-Afghan War in May 1919. The monthlong war gained the Afghans the conduct of their own foreign affairs. The Treaty of Rawalpindi was signed on August 8, 1919, and amended in 1921. Before signing the final document with the British, the Afghans concluded a treaty of friendship with the new Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union. Afghanistan thereby became one of the first states to recognize the Soviet government, and a “special relationship” evolved between the two governments that lasted until December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Amānullāh changed his title from emir to pādshāh (“king”) in 1923 and inaugurated a decade of reforms—including implementing constitutional and administrative changes, allowing women to remove their veils, and establishing coeducational schools—that offended conservative religious and tribal leaders.

Civil war broke out in November 1928, and a Tajik folk hero called Bacheh Saqqāw (Bacheh-ye Saqqā; “Child of a Water Carrier”) occupied Kabul. Amānullāh abdicated in January 1929 in favour of his elder brother, Inayatullāh, but Bacheh Saqqāw proclaimed himself Ḥabībullāh Ghāzī (or Ḥabībullāh II), emir of Afghanistan. Amānullāh failed to retrieve his throne and went into exile in Italy. He died in 1960 in Zürich, Switzerland.

Moḥammad Nāder Shah (1929–33)

Ḥabībullāh II was driven from the throne by Moḥammad Nāder Khan and his brothers, distant cousins of Amānullāh. On October 10, 1929, Ḥabībullāh II was executed along with 17 of his followers. A tribal assembly elected Nāder Khan as shah, and the opposition was bloodily persecuted.

Nāder Shah produced a new constitution in 1931 that was modeled on Amānullāh’s constitution of 1923 but was more conservatively oriented to appease Islamic religious leaders. The national economy developed in the 1930s under the leadership of several entrepreneurs who began small-scale industrial projects. Nāder Shah was assassinated on November 8, 1933, and the 19-year-old crown prince, Zahir, succeeded his father.