"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport became, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." - Sam Dalrymple

"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport becomes, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." — Sam Dalrymple

We sat down with historian Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, for UNAPOLOGETIC. His argument: the "Partition" most people know from 1947 was only one of five ruptures that broke apart the old British "Indian Empire" — a single administrative unit stretching from Aden in Yemen to the borders of Thailand — between 1937 and 1971, producing the twelve nation-states of today's South Asia and Arabian Gulf. This was a world where the Sultans of Oman were schooled in Rajasthan and  ...