Shattered Lands
Published by: William Collins
A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it.
As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire’, or more simply as the Raj.
Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.
Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.
Read an extract from the book here.
Our judges said:
Shattered Lands has the quality of some of the best history books: it makes you constantly ask yourself if what you are reading can possibly be true because it is so surprising and underdiscussed. It tells its story with compassionate, funny character portraits and vignettes that give an insight into a world that was, in many ways, unimaginably different to our own. It is the story of one of the 20th Century's most important, and yet least appreciated, events and brilliantly shows how contingent history can be.
