What can Indian and Pakistani press archives, government records and memoirs tell us about the Middle East of the 1920s and ’30s, when Britain’s empire was in its twilight years? What did the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, the movement for Egyptian independence, or the crisis in British Mandate Palestine have to do with the decision to partition India?
How did Muhammad Ali Jinnah go from being a secular young man appalled by Indian interference in the Ottoman Caliphate crisis to the moving spirit behind the demand for Pakistan – a new Islamic nation which, he claimed, would be capable of defending Muslims abroad?
These are the kinds of questions that kept me awake at night for years. The result of that insomnia is my new book, East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars.
