Dr Khan will talk about Partition's place in global history, and situate the South Asian refugee within the wider histories of refugee narratives.
The 1940s was the decade with the most recorded human displacement in world history.
Partition had many unique features but it was also part of a global phenomenon in the 1940s, when many millions of people were displaced by war and state creation in Europe, China and the Middle East. Ideas about the ‘exchange of population’ marked the thinking of many statesmen as a ‘solution’ to constitutional and social issues as new nationalisms emerged at the end of empire.
This paper is a tentative attempt to consider Partition from a different spatial dimension by thinking about its place in global history, and situating the South Asian refugee within the wider histories of refugee narratives.
Yasmin Khan is a British historian and writer, and University Lecturer in British History (18th to early 20th century) based in the Department for Continuing Education and a member of the History Faculty.
Her research focuses on the history of the British in India, the British Empire, South Asian decolonization, refugees and the aftermath of empire. She has also written about the Second World War and the imperial dimensions of the conflict.
She was educated at Oxford (St. Peter’s and St. Antony’s colleges) and was previously a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has held research grants from the British Academy (Postdoctoral Fellowship) the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.
Publications include The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press/Penguin India, 2007) which won the Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society. She has also published in journals including History Workshop Journal, Modern Asian Studies and the Roundtable: the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.