Durrani Empire

The Durrani Empire was the Afghan empire from 1747 to 1826, the state modern Afghanistan claims as its beginning. When Nader Shah was murdered in 1747, his Afghan guards looted the camp treasury and rode home; at Kandahar the chiefs elected Ahmad, of the Sadozai clan, lifting him on a grass mound for a throne. Ahmad Shah took the pearl title Durr-i-Durran and spent twenty five years conquering in every direction: Herat and Kabul, Balkh and Kashmir, and nine times down into India, where at Panipat in 1761 his Afghans annihilated the Maratha host in the bloodiest day of the century and made North India pay tribute. His empire ran from Khorasan to the Punjab, held together by plunder shares and his own prestige. His son Timur moved the capital to Kabul and lost the Punjab's edges; his grandsons blinded and deposed each other while the Barakzai ministers grew strong. Shah Shuja, twice king and twice exiled, would return with British bayonets in 1839 for the disastrous First Afghan War. By 1826 Kabul itself belonged to the Barakzai, the Durrani line survived in Herat a generation longer, and the empire dissolved into the emirate the British would fight over.