| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Ian Talbot. Pakistan: A Modern History. London: C. Hurst&Co. 1998. Pp. xvi, 432. $35.00.

The fiftieth anniversary of a state is an appropriate time to write a history of that state. Ian Talbot has done so for Pakistan and has done a superb job. He has an advantage over political scientists, who often undertake such a task, as he is a historian. The usual study of Pakistan does not ignore the history of the "Pakistan movement" that led to the demand for a separate state for the Muslim majority areas of united India. Nor does Talbot, but he brings into the study a field in which he has excelled in his earlier writings: the governance of the territory that is now Pakistan during the British Raj (see, for example, Punjab and the Raj, 1848–1947 [1988]). 1

Talbot's thesis is that the British-controlled territory acquired before the mid-nineteenth century and generally to the east of the Indus valley was acquired for mainly commercial reasons. It may also be true, as is often said, that is was gained "in a fit of absence of mind." Talbot states, quite correctly in my view, that the Indus valley and the land to the west was taken for reasons of security, against tsarist expansion and Afghan raiding. This is not to say that there were not security areas in the east as well; the Northeast Frontier Agency (now Arunachal Pradesh) is an example. . . .

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