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Professor Ian Talbot is a Professor in History of Modern South Asia at the University of Southampton.

His key interests are in the fields of the history of the colonial Punjab; the 1947 Partition of India and the history of Pakistan.

He has recently completed a co-authored major study of the 1947 Partition of India and its aftermath for the Cambridge University Press series New Approaches to Asian History. The work follows on from his long-term interest in the division of India and the emergence of Pakistan. It builds on the monograph I published in 2006 with Oxford University Press entitled Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947-57. This study was funded by a two-year year Leverhulme Major Research fellowship which was held in conjunction with a Visiting Fellowship in History at Balliol College Oxford during 2003-4.

In addition to his work on the 1947 Partition, he is interested in Pakistan’s post-independence political history. He has have published numerous articles on this subject. My main contribution is the major text entitled, Pakistan: A Modern History. This was published in 1999 by Hurst, reissued in an expanded form in 2005 and has now entered its third edition in 2008.

He is currently working on a study of the Punjab region of the subcontinent in the decade which followed independence. He is also contributing to a number of edited volumes as well as acting as the Guest Editor for a special issue on the 1947 Partition by the Journal of Cultural and Social History. This volume brings together some of the papers which were presented at the University of Southampton in July 2007 in an international conference on the theme of ‘The Independence of India and Pakistan: Sixtieth Anniversary Reflections.’

He is currently an elected Council member of the Royal Asiatic Society. I was previously Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies (2011-14) and a Member of the British academy South Asian Panel (2011-16).

He has held visiting fellowships at the University of Warwick (2012-13), and Balliol College, Oxford (2003-4). Most recently (2018-19) I was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the South Asia Institute, Harvard University.

Lahore in the Time of the Raj
The book contends that under British rule, the city of Lahore continued with its centuries old legacy of connection through trade, movements of people, and ideas beyond its boundaries. Fully utilising modern means of communications such as the railways, steamships and print culture, the colonial Lahore ushered in a new age of globalisation that intensified its cultural, social, and commercial linkage with a wider world. This assertion stands in sharp opposition to the colonial representation of Lahore as “inward looking” and an isolated space fraught with squalor and disease