Trade ‘outside the law’: Uzbek and Afghan transnational merchants between Yiwu and South-Central Asia
Year: 2022

This article analyses the trajectories of two transnational networks present in the Chinese city of Yiwu: Afghan merchants who trade goods in and out Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan; and Uzbek traders (citizens of either Tajikistan or Uzbekistan) who commercialize their merchandise in and out Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Our aim is to capture an ethnographically grounded understanding of informal markets and economies by analysing the notion of trade ‘outside the law’, including the c