This classic study of the Punjab province of British India focuses on the role which it played as a bastion of imperial interests and the resulting legacies for its politics. The province was both the ‘sword arm’ and the ‘breadbasket’ of India. The British recruited into the Indian Army, Punjabi Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus from the so-called ‘martial castes.’ They were rewarded with tracts of lands in the new canal colonies which were created in a massive irrigation development from the 1880s. The social engineering which accompanied the transformation of the barren ‘waste’ of...