What came before the UN?: In Egypt, China, ancient bids to administer the world
We've been trying to work around borders more or less since we first invented them. Often, this wish came from a drive for power. Ancient kingdoms, over and over, imagined they would 'rule everything under the heavens'.
A bid to prosper and endure drove such campaigns too, since prospering and enduring have always been difficult to do alone. Here are three of the earliest attempts at a unified world order.
A first effort: Akkadian Empire, Mesopotamia (2300 BCE)
This is the earliest known multinational empire. At its peak, it consisted of a range of city-states that stretched from parts of Iran in the east to the Levant (modern-day Syria and Israel) in the west, and from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey in the north to parts of the Arabian desert.
Called the Akkadian Empire, it was set up by King Sargon (2334-2279 BCE), who ascended the throne in an unusual way.
Unlike his predecessors, he did not claim to represent the gods. Instead, he projected himself as a self-made leader. In a sense, he had to. He was not born of 'royal' blood.
In fact, it was said, in the contemporary lore about him, that Sargon was an orphan who was set adrift in a reed basket along the Euphrates, before being discovered and raised by a gardener. (Isn't it interesting how so many of our legends and myths echo and back and forth through time?)
He was, at some point, appointed cup-bearer to the Mesopotamian king Ur-Zababa. He rose, over time, to the position of general in his army. Then he overthrew his king.
Using anti-incumbency to his benefit, he spread word that he was as distanced from the lineage of kings as could be, and could do things differently as a result, and usher in a golden age.
As kingdom after kingdom pledged fealty to what was now becoming the Mesopotamian Empire, he conducted military campaigns as shows of strength, and to annex the unwilling. Sargon's sons Rimush and Manishtushu held the vast kingdom together after his death.
The empire grew to be so vast that it is believed to have birthed one of the earliest bureaucracies. Hundreds of surviving seals and tablets show how the administrators documented state affairs, preserved blueprints of major structures, drew maps of canals, and kept meticulous accounts of livestock, fish, barley, cloth, gems and beer.
All-in-all, it lasted about a century. Most records attribute the fall to in-fighting between the Sumerian city-states, and the lack of a dominant central leader.
Gains and loss: Ancient Egypt (2613-1425 BCE)
The key to this majestic empire lay in a single word: maat.
In Ancient Egyptian belief, this was a term for cosmic order and a state of harmony between gods and the world. It was the Egyptian king Sneferu (2613–2589 BCE) who first associated maat with politics.
Governance, in this period, became linked to the welfare of the soul. Pharaohs, their ministers and bureaucrats prioritised the building of temples, offerings to gods, and the expansion and protection of the borders.
That last bit soon took on a dominant role. Egypt began a phase of furious annexation, until the kingdom stretched from Nubia (parts of Egypt and Sudan along the Nile Valley) into the Sinai Peninsula, encompassing Syria and the Euphrates.
These borders would fluctuate, under successive pharaohs. Yet, for all its grandeur, this land would eventually come to be ruled by a succession of foreign powers for over 2,500 years, starting with the Assyrians from Ancient Mesopotamia in the 7th century BCE, followed by the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans and the British.
When Gamal Abdel Nasser took over as the second President of Egypt in 1954, he was the first Egyptian to rule Egypt since the pharaohs. (The first president of the modern republic was Mohamed Naguib, originally of Sudan.)
All under heaven: China, 221 BCE-220 CE
In China, an ambitious king united warring kingdoms in 221 BCE by promoting the Chinese ideal of tianxia, literally, 'all under heaven'.
As Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE) crafted the first Chinese imperial dynasty, he had a little help from the long-gone-but-rather-immortal Confucius (who lived in the 5th and 6th centuries BCE).
Closely linked to the idea of tianxia was an idea that philosopher had espoused, called Da Tong, or the Great Unity. This belief system envisioned a world government that ruled not by force but by attraction. This would be a government so selfless in its service to the people that the world would simply coalesce around it.
Using this ideal of 'stability in unity' as a propaganda tool, the Qin launched massive military campaigns to expand into parts of Central Asia and Vietnam.
The Qin dynasty was followed by the Han, which ruled for over 400 years, from 206 BCE to 220 CE. They continued the military expansion, eventually dividing the empire into inner and outer realms. Inner territories came under direct control of the Son of Heaven, the emperor. The outer realms were controlled via tributes and alliances.
Bonus: The Perpetual Peace doctrine of Immanuel Kant (1795)
In his essay Perpetual Peace, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a radical idea: a federation of free, self-governing republics bound not by conquest but by a shared commitment to autonomy and peace.
Kant was 71 at the time. Europe was living through the bloody horrors of the French Revolution (1789-99), and the wars that followed between Revolutionary France and the monarchies of Austria and Prussia.
Against this violent backdrop, Kant imagined a world in which peace wasn't just a pause to war but a permanent condition that nations committed to uphold.
The six 'preliminary articles' he laid out were a mix of prescience and idealism. In order for there to be peace, he said, diplomacy would need to be transparent; standing armies should be gradually abolished; national debt should not be raised in order to fund wars; states must not interfere in each other's internal affairs; acts of hostility that destroy trust must be banned; and peace treaties must be designed to end wars permanently, not merely defer them.
Some of these ideas remain at the heart of international relations, and are echoed in the framework of the United Nations. What they run up against, of course, is a world underpinned by ancient fears and insecurities.
As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, more than a century before Kant: The natural state of man is war.
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This book is about the five partitions of the Indian Empire, which stretched from Aden in the west to Burma in the east to now 12 nations in three geographic regions. At the time, you write, even Britain downplayed its size. Nepal and Oman were never officially recognized. Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire and Himalayan states near Tibet were left off the maps. But these were all run by the Indian political service, defended by the Indian army, their currency was the Indian rupee. So how did the British manage to hide them? And what did the Indian Empire actually look like? Sam Dalrymple, author, Shattered Lands (Courtesy HarperCollins) So, for example, a 1909 map [Political Divisions of the Indian Empire by The Indian Gazetteer] shows Burma as British India, and Nepal and Bhutan as princely states — they're in yellow exactly like Jaipur and Hyderabad are — but hides Arabia. A 1909 map of Aden by The Indian Gazetteer recognizes much of southern Yemen as dominated by princely states. A rare Indian Empire map from 1930 includes Aden but not the Gulf states. The British were always quite reticent to talk about what they were doing in the Arabian states, partially because very few people actually lived there. These were the poorest states in the Raj. Oil hadn't been discovered yet, and so, largely, it was small settlements on the coast. The Brits were only involving themselves in the cities and making sure that the sheikhs were abiding by them. The person who integrated the sheikhs of the Gulf into the Indian empire was Lord Curzon. Lord Curzon went on a Durbar trip to Sharjah [in 1903] and invited the sheikhs and gave them all gun salutes, and created a Persian Gulf residency, on the model of the Hyderabad residency or the Jaipur residency. So, subsequently you had the list of princely states beginning alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. There's a map of the Arabian peninsula in the Gazetteer issued to Indian civil servants, and if you placed it beside the India maps, it gave you a full picture of the size of the Indian Empire from Aden to Rangoon. The public never got to see its full scale though. The Ottoman Empire officially claimed the Arabian peninsula and the British wanted to avoid aggravating Constantinople, so they always kept the Arabian Raj off official maps of India. Likewise, Britain's presence in Nepal and Bhutan — they didn't want to scare China or Tibet. But officially under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these were India. And everyone was eligible for an Indian passport... At the Round Table Conference on Burma in 1931, Burmese leaders were against separation from India. In Aden at the same time, some saw 'the connection with India as organic.' The city's many Gujarati and Parsi residents thought Aden 'was an integral part of the Indian nation'. In the 1940s, the Nawab of Bhopal wanted the princely states to, instead of acceding to India or Pakistan, be unified as a third dominion called 'Rajastan'. The Nagas wanted a separate Christian state under the Commonwealth nation. Kalat [in present-day Balochistan], then the third largest princely state in the Raj, wanted to be independent. What were, at the time, considered the most plausible partitions? I think what's remarkable is how late the idea of independence comes up. It took them until 1929 to ask for it. What they'd all been asking for until then is for the interconnectivity of the empire to remain but for equal opportunity within the empire. The model was the Roman Empire, which, around 200 AD, became completely racially equal — so Philip the Arab could become the Roman emperor and then you've got people from Tunisia or Egypt or Syria or France suddenly ruling the Roman Empire. So, for early nationalists, it would have included everything from Aden to Burma as one giant country probably governed along a system like the United States of America, which was another country that had gained independence from Britain in the past. Once it became clear that independence was happening, you had hundreds of different ideas of what different states could look like and virtually no one could have imagined what we actually got. Gandhi wanted independence for basically Bharatvarsha. He wanted to carve out a nation state that resembled Bharat of Mahabharata fame. We're so used to this idea of undivided India that we forget until as late as the 1920s, it had never been attempted before to have all of it ruled on one country. Even Ashoka and the Mughals had never ruled over the whole of the subcontinent. There had always been a bit of Tamil Nadu or a bit of Kerala that had been independent. Or it had included Afghanistan as well or something. There were various other ideas of kind of uniting all the Muslim areas. There were ideas of Burmese nationalists. There was a very early idea of a Dravidian state that has Hindustan and India as two separate bits. The idea that we grow up with in Delhi schools is the idea that Gandhi had of this eternal Bharat. The fact that there were hundreds of other visions or just near misses is forgotten. 536pp, ₹799; HarperCollins Did Gandhi set the tone for what India now looks like? It wasn't him specifically. The idea that set it up was in the wake of the 1905 Partition of Bengal. You suddenly had nationalists producing images of Bharat Mata, and the Congress latched on to it. But the depiction of independent India as Bharat Mata alienated the Burmese and the Arabs. These partitions occurred within the last hundred years and still exist in living memory. The 'Long March' of about 600,000 Indian refugees from Burma, 80,000 of whom die... How well are these stories documented — and were they hard to access? The origin story of this book was from a conversation with someone in Tripura who I was asking about Partition for our Project Dastaan [an initiative co-founded by Dalrymple in 2018 to reconnect people displaced by Partition]. And they said 'Which partition? ... Because there was the 1937 one from Burma, 1947 from India. And then Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971 and we got another influx for refugees.' And I, having studied Partition for three years, had never considered that. Each of these 12 countries has brushed over its past. Unlike Partition where lots of people are still alive, the 'Long March' was six years earlier so we've lost six more years and it's very late to get these stories out. I've only got a couple of people who I was able to interview in person. A Sikh family from north London — of the character Uttam Singh from the book, his grandkids — had reached out to me on Instagram and said they had a Partition story. I told them about what I was doing with the book and they said 'Oh, we were in Punjab for Partition, but actually before 1941 we were all in Burma.' And then they opened this trunk and they had an untranslated diary, photographs, and everything. I think that the key one though is Yemen — it lost most of its papers in the communist takeover of South Yemen. Many of the archives there were burnt. And all of these Arab states have been very harsh with their citizenship laws — about who gets to be Kuwaiti or from Dubai... and they don't particularly want to run over this history, especially in the present day. But the big story there got discovered by professor James Onley, who was the director of research at the Qatar National Library. He was commissioned by the sheikh of Qatar, who wanted to create a Qatari digital library, to find documents relating to Qatari history. And there was nothing in Qatar on what its life was before the 1950s and '60s. He eventually stumbled upon the fact that everything is sitting in the Bombay archives. It's not in London, it's not in Qatar, it's all in Bombay. He wrote a big book that's a classic called The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj (2007). You've used a lot of personal correspondences and diaries for your research — starting from letters written by John Simon [of the Simon Commission] to his mother describing his travels, or the ones between Sarojini Naidu and her daughter Padmaja, Asha Sahay who was a foot soldier of the INA, Uttam Singh... Tell me more about finding private papers and working with such personal research material. There were some particularly interesting ones. Two of the wildest interviews and private papers I had was Ghalib Al-Qu'aiti, the Yemeni Sultan, who's descended from the Nizam of Hyderabad. I ended up meeting him and he's living stateless in Jeddah; he's not allowed to leave the country and the Brits are refusing to give him a passport. He'd attempted to write his own autobiography but never got it published... he had all these letters and private papers that no one's really ever used before. The other one was Feroz Khan Noon, the seventh prime minister of Pakistan, who was removed when martial law was first imposed in 1957. His family live in Lahore and the family archives just haven't been utilized. And then the other one was actually my godmother Brigid Keenan who, as a young girl saw the last Brits disappearing through the Gateway of India and whose father was in the PBF, the Punjab Boundary Force. He was an Irishman who is one of the few people who volunteers to try and keep the peace... and I found his letters, which were just sitting in a house in Somerset. What was your most surprising discovery? That the Persian Gulf remained a part of the Indian Empire till 1947. That one muddled me. And it was weirdly difficult to find any papers on — so much of it is online, but it's difficult to find anyone talking about it. The thing that we've got to remember is that the Gulf was the lowest ranking princely states in the Indian empire. Not even worthy of one gun salute, you write. They weren't invited! The Sultan of Oman is the exception, and Qu'aiti State, the guys in Eastern Yemen. Oman had 21 [gun salutes] Qu'aiti State had 10, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi had zero. They all were invited to go to Mayo College, etcetera as princes. I think that's going be the big surprise for Indian readers – the fact that there was a world where the united oil wealth of the entire Gulf could have gone to either India, or let's not forget, Pakistan. These were Muslim-majority states, they could have joined Pakistan instead and probably would have. Many cities, thriving centres of culture and trade, suffered tragic declines in this time. What were some of the biggest casualties? I don't think we should be nostalgic about the 1930s. Each of these countries has gained things and lost things. This was a time of high imperialism and very racially segmented societies that worked on the basis of exclusion. One of the places that's changed the most and suffered the most in this time would probably be Hyderabad, which was this centre of courtly wonder and baroque palaces. So much has been lost, so many great libraries, collections of art — Hyderabad should be the number one tourist destination in the country and would have been in the 1930s. Jaipur and Jodhpur and Udaipur and all the places we visit today were nothing compared to Hyderabad. Half of it was bulldozed, destroyed and ghettoized in the wake of the events of the 1940s. But I feel like it's a complicated legacy. This was also a place of great brutality, probably the most socially hierarchical place in the entire subcontinent with bonded labour ruining the lives of most the population. Today, through the lens of modern politics, we often look at it as a Hindu-Muslim thing with the Nizam as a Muslim, but I think if we look at it through the lens of class, we see that this was the site of, in the 1950s, South Asia's biggest communist movement and communist revolution. The Indian Army was still fighting communists in the Telangana countryside three years after it went into the place. Burma lost something immense. It was the most multicultural region in Asia, and today it's driven by ethnic factionalism, mass murder and civil war. But at the same time, Rangoon in the 1930s was also not necessarily a completely open place. It was driven heavily by class and race. Aden was a very diverse cosmopolitan place filled with traders from across the Indian ocean. It was one-third Indian, one-third Somali, one-third Arab, about ten percent Jews. Like Rangoon, it is the one that's fallen the most from one of the great ports of the world to a southern Yemeni city that's now riven by ethnic and religious civil war. The culture of Lahore is mourned immensely. But there were quite justifiable reasons many Muslims felt like they needed separation. Urvashi Butalia and Aanchal Malhotra have both talked a lot about this. People in Lahore who lived through Partition, who miss their friends, but also will tell you about how Hindus were never able to eat in the same room as their Muslim best friends. You write about the alliance between India and Pakistan after Partition. How did it come about and what went wrong? Of the two books that really discovered this, one is Pallavi Raghavan's Animosity at Bay (2019), which is an alternative history of the relationship of India and Pakistan. After the ceasefire in 1949 over Kashmir, both countries were quite happy to leave it to the UN and move on creating a new future, particularly in the wake of the Liaquat–Nehru Pact. And so Jinnah's tomb was built by an Indian Muslim. His daughter lived in Bombay her whole life without much issue. There were whole communities with half a family living on one side and the other half on the other side of the border. The other book is Avinash Paliwal's who was the first to used declassified intelligence files from the Northeast, and he's completely rewritten everything that we thought — because until that point, we'd been relying on memoirs and oral histories and news reports, often which got things wrong. Bizarrely, the thing that breaks apart the India-Pakistan relationship is India sending the army into Goa [in 1961] to annex it from the Portuguese. And that whilst everyone in India and half the world saw this as a final moment of decolonization, the Pakistani leadership, which had a year earlier put a military pact with India on the table, saw it as India suddenly muscling up its army, taking on European powers militarily, and essentially as a new Indian expansionism — that India would have this irredentist thing of trying to claim back lost territory. So the Pakistani leadership was terrified and started funding Naga separatists the same year. Within a year, India started funding the Pashtuns and Bengali separatists. And it became a tit for tat. But from 1949 to 1960, the whole of the 1950s, there was another way, many what-ifs that could have happened. And I think that more research really needs to be done to figure out the details of what went wrong. The 1965 war is actually the one that broke down the complete relationship: enemy property acts come in, all transport across the borders stopped, the beginning of a border wall is built up. How was the Northeast affected by Partition? The Northeast was probably the most affected by Partition. It's the reason that the Northeast is now a strange appendage on the right of India. Tripura was 20 kms from Chittagong, South Asia's largest port, and suddenly became landlocked by 2,000 kms in an area with no roads. The economy completely crumbled, and the indigenous population was overwhelmed by Bengalis flooding into the country. Half of the conflict, with the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, all of the others — the AFSPA agitation, the insurgencies in Tripura, Mizoram and Nagaland — have roots in Partition. Many of the ethnic conflicts in the Northeast — when you grow up in Delhi, at least — seemed so complicated. But the moment you think about how everything has to do with borders cutting through communities, and with regions being overwhelmed by new migrants, suddenly all of its politics became clear overnight. That fog lifted. Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
