Shattered Lands Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

A Financial Times, NPR, and BBC History Best Book of the Year

A bold and sweeping history of modern South Asia, told through the five partitions that reshaped it.

As recently as 1928, a vast swath of Asia stretching from the Red Sea to the borders of Thailand was bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the “Indian Empire” or, more simply, as the Raj. It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, home to a quarter of the world’s population. In the span of just fifty years, that empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving it into twelve modern nations, including not only India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but also Burma, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

In vivid and compulsively readable prose, Sam Dalrymple presents, for the first time, the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. It’s a story of maps being redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, bumbling politicians in London and idealist revolutionaries in Delhi, kings in remote palaces and ordinary citizens swept up in wars and mass migrations. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And it has left behind a legacy of exile and division.