Ayesha Jalal is among the best-known historians of Pakistan working today. As she explains in the preface to her new history of Pakistan, the writing of this book was prompted by her sense that, after having completed a series of important books on aspects of Pakistan's history, “the time had come to write a definitive history of Pakistan in a changing global context” (p. x).
The strength of the book lies in its fluid narrative style and in the way that it builds on arguments developed in Jalal's earlier published works. This is particularly evident in the first half of the book. Themes from Jalal's The Sole Spokesman (on Jinnah and the Pakistan movement) and The State of Martial Rule (on the rise of military domination in Pakistan in the decade after partition) dominate the early framing of Jalal's narrative of Pakistan's history.16 Central to her story is the...
