Here's a sketch of the "Workshop of the Amir of Afghanistan" in an 1893 Urdu-language journal titled Ainah-yi Angrezi Saudagari (Mirror of English Manufactures). The journal was published in London but sold in cities across India.

Published throughout the 1880s and 1890s, it primarily sought to advertise British products to Indian merchants and wealthy consumers. Adverts included bicycles, engines, Birmingham guns, ovens, oil seed presses, and machinery for the paper industry).

The journal also featured articles that its editors thought would be edifying or interesting to the Indian merchant class, usually on industrial and technological developments across the British Empire and beyond. Here's one on the techniques of silver-casting in Sheffield.

Which brings us back to the Amir of Afghanistan and his workshop. Around 1890, Abdul Rahman Khan brought foreign technical experts to Kabul, in an effort to build "modern" industrial workshops, centralizing many of the cities laborers and artisans in new industrial neighborhoods.

The Mirror of English Manufactures celebrated the approach. It also encouraged "Indian Rajas and Nawabs" to learn from the Amir and demonstrate their "interest in the welfare of their country" by encouraging the modernization and education of their workers and artisans.

Ultimately, the journal is an interesting snapshot into both the advertising practices of British manufacturers within the empire and the discourses of industrial modernity that Britain sought to export to its colonies.