Professor Ian Talbot Inaugural Lecture Event

In the Chair: Judith Brown, Professorial Fellow and Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, Balliol College, University of Oxford.

The creation of Pakistan in 1947 was accompanied by the division of the two major Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal. In the Punjab, the new international boundary ran between the neighbouring cities of Lahore and Amritsar. This lecture sheds light on the immediate and longer-term impacts arising from the dislocation as widespread violence forced minority populations to migrate and the emerging ‘Cold War’ between India and Pakistan disrupted the cities’ old patterns of trade and access to raw materials. The socio-economic history of the cities in the post-partition decade sheds important light on both the continuities and discontinuities arising from the Partition of the Indian subcontinent.

Ian Talbot is a Professor of Modern British History, and the current Head of History in Humanities. His long-term interest has been the division of India and the emergence of Pakistan, and he is a recognised expert in this field. He is a co-founder of the International Journal of Punjab Studies , and has recently co-authored a major study of the 1947 partition of India and its aftermath for the Cambridge University Press, which adds to a vast array of previous publications. Ian Talbot organised a major international conference in 2007 on the Independence of India and Pakistan, and is now involved as a joint convenor of the 25th annual British Association for South Asian Studies conference to be held at the University of Southampton in April next year.

Each of the Inaugural Lectures held in Humanities have an end of lecture collection for a good cause. For this lecture, support will be given to the Pakistan Flood Appeal.