At a time when the ravages of anthropogenic climate change demand planetary solutions, many world leaders are taking recourse in a resurgent ethno-nationalist stance. Partition, the demarcation of borders along ethno-religious lines, was the most prominent example of this in the twentieth century, and it has reemerged in diplomatic circles as a strategy for managing ethnic conflict in places like Iraq, Yemen, Ukraine, and Syria; originally, it was offered by the departing British Empire to the former colony as the ideal diplomatic solution for the problem of intractable ethnic divisions. By examining the genealogy and the effects of this violent ethno-nationalist organizing principle across three contexts, editors Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson unravel the history of an imperial tactic while refusing its own sectarian logics of divide et impera. Although other histories of partition in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, and South Asia have been necessarily transnational in scope, Dubnov and Robson's anthology places scholars otherwise siloed in their respective postcolonial regions of expertise into fruitful conversation with each other.

Contributors to Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism are historians whose prior publications have focused on common themes of decolonization, violence, and nationalism. The overarching argument is that in each spatial context, partition was not a finite event in time but an ongoing form of devolution, debated by British colonial administrators and anticolonial leaders vying for power. Far from resolving ethnic conflicts, partition enabled the British to execute a quick exit strategy from “landscapes of long-term geopolitical deferral” (6). A world order based on nation-states and concomitant notions of majoritarian and minoritarian interests emerged no earlier than World War I and was enshrined in the League of Nations, backed by the British and French imperial powers. With the end of World War II, the British obscured the imperial genealogy of partition and it entered, with a refurbished and neutral image, into newly formed bodies like the United Nations as an essential part of the diplomatic toolbox. The failures of partition to either protect minority rights or stabilize regions were attributed to the failures of postcolonial nation-states, perennially entangled in primordial hatreds, and insufficiently modern compared to their Western counterparts. Only by acknowledging the imperial (and quite recent) origins of this governance technique and its reliance on colonial ethnography to foment divisions can we begin to understand why partition has invariably exacerbated mass violence rather than resolved communal conflicts.

Each of the ten chapters intervenes in the field of intellectual history by tracking the way the concept of partition traveled. Taking Edward Said's “traveling theory” as a point of departure, the contributors explore the genesis of the idea in its colonial contexts. Half of the volume is devoted to Palestine, and the South Asian and Irish partitions cases draw parallels between these three contexts. In chapter 1, Faisal Devji examines how for Mohammed Iqbal (1877–1938), the poet and founder of the Pakistan movement, the Jewish minority was an instructive site of identification and reflection for Indian Muslims. Iqbal's adoption of a rabbinical form of orthodoxy was paired with his simultaneous repudiation of Ahmadiyya Muslims as heretical; here Devji also considers the afterlife of India's Partition of 1947 in the ongoing persecution of Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan. In chapter 2, Dubnov follows the British imperial apologist historian and diplomat Sir Reginald Coupland (1884–1952), courier of the traveling theory of partition who socially connected various influential figures across the British Empire through a leading role in the Round Table group and distilled the abstraction of imperialism into popular biographies. Although Coupland advocated partition for Palestine as a member of the 1937 Peel Commission, he opposed India's Partition; Coupland's ideas about partition, Dubnov explains, were part of an imperial federalist plan to constitute a Third British Empire of dominions. Motti Golani in chapter 3 complicates the genealogy of partition by demonstrating how Zionist Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952) devised the partition plan and then convinced Coupland to present it within intra-European diplomatic circles as a British solution to the problem of Palestine. The second section is devoted to the dissemination of the idea, focusing on a set of British colonial officials who sought to apply it to various localities. Kate O'Malley in chapter 4 documents how the South Asian Partition bore the imprint of the formation of the new Irish Free State. Lucy Chester in chapter 5 and Penny Sinanoglou in chapter 6 examine how partition implemented in Palestine was, in turn, influenced by the partition of South Asia. The final section examines the transformation of the idea through accommodation and resistance: Adi Gordon explores liberal Zionists in chapter 7, while Joel Beinin in chapter 8 follows the case of liberal Arab intellectuals like Albert Hourani (1915–1993), and Priya Satia in chapter 9 analyzes their South Asian counterparts, specifically poets and intellectuals in South Asia and Britain. The concluding epilogue by A. Dirk Moses contextualizes the idea of partition within the contemporary diplomatic jargon of national security and retributive violence.

This anthology provides a welcome invitation to identify partition as an imperial construct with a very particular twentieth century genealogy. However, one wonders how the authors would engage with the question of violence on the local level, fought street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, within the bosom of the family. In a later essay, Said returned to his original concept of “traveling theory” and explained that he was interested in charting more than geographic dispersion as a theory could develop far away from its antecedents, no longer domesticated. Today, the traveling theory of partition has turned feral within its various contexts. Now that we know who initially lit these still burning fires in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Israel, Palestine, and Ireland, how might we mobilize this knowledge to douse those flames? Surely, the task of decolonizing partition should not be delegated to state officials alone. Without scaling their analysis to this level, there is the danger that such an excellent anthology with its implications for how partition was a derivative discourse will itself remain siloed within the rarefied atmosphere of diplomatic exchanges.