Old World Empires Cultures of Power & Governance in Eurasia Ilhan Niaz The book provides a one-volume historical survey of the origins, development and nature of state power in Eurasia. It covers several historical monarchies and autocracies and provides an insight of how the rulers of bygone days resorted to intrigues, coercion, torture and complete obedience from their relatives, subordinates and subjects in order to have absolute control over all matters of governance. Annexation & the Unhappy Valley The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonisation Matthew A Cook Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonisation addresses the nineteenth century expansion and consolidation of British colonial power in the Sindh region of South Asia. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and employs a fine-grained, nuanced and situated reading of multiple agents and their actions. It explores how the political and administrative incorporation of territory by East India Company informs the conversion of intra-cultural distinctions into socio-historical conflicts among the colonized and colonizers. The book focuses on colonial direct rule, rather than the more commonly studied indirect rule, of South Asia. It socio-culturally explores how agents, perspectives and intentions vary-both within and across regions-to impact the actions and structures of colonial governance. The Punjab under Imperialism 1885-1947 Imran Ali This comprehensive survey of British rule in the Punjab demonstrates that colonial policy-making led to many of the socio-economic and political problems currently plaguing Pakistan and Indian Punjab. Subordinating development goals to its political and military imperatives, the colonial state co-operated with the dominant social classes, the members of which became the major beneficiaries of agricultural colonization. Even while the rulers tried to use the vast resources of the Punjab to advance imperial purposes, they were themselves being used by their collaborators to advance implacable private interests. Such processes effectively retarded both nationalism and social change and resulted in the continued backwardness of the region even after the departure of the British. Blood over Different Shades of Green East Pakistan 1971: History Revisited Ikram Sehgal & Bettina Robotka The famous British philosopher of history RG Collingwood suggested that a historian must ‘reconstruct’ history by using ‘historical imagination’ to ‘re-enact’ the thought processes of historical persons based on information and evidence from historical sources. That is what the authors of the present book have tried to do. The events of 1971 that resulted in the breakup of Pakistan are a milestone in Pakistan’s history. To retrieve what happened and why it happened is an exercise that so far has been avoided or left at best incomplete. The book based on published and unpublished memories of activists of 1971 attempts to give a critical assessment of the events and spell out lessons that have to be learnt. The Silk Road & Beyond Narratives of a Muslim Historian Iftikhar H Malik The Silk Road and Beyond attempts to capture lived realities across Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Finland, Britain, USA, Palestine, Switzerland, Finland and the subcontinent. It also aims at initiating readers into encountering Muslim heritage across the four continents where cultures share commonalities beyond the narrowly defined premise of conflicts. This book is an effort to capture history, literature, mobility, crafts, architectural traditions and cultural vistas by focusing on diverse Muslim individuals, communities, cities, and their edifices. It attempts to reconstruct deeper and munificent aspects of Muslim histories and lived experience that often stay ignored by the writers and travellers. Normative accounts of cities such as Bukhara, Jerusalem, Isfahan, Fes, Samarkand, Granada, Palermo, Cordova, or Konya may lifelessly posit them as sheer tourist destinations, ignoring their cultural and historical depth.