Agreed Frontier
Ladakh became a region of great commercial and strategic importance to the British in the mid-nineteenth century as it offered routes to the marts of Central Asia, and also impinged on the Chinese and Russian frontiers. What were the political and military compulsions behind the successive boundary commissions set up in the nineteenth century? To what extent did the Chinese respond to British diplomatic overtures over delineating frontiers? To what extent did the views of Whitehall converge with those of the Government of India? By drawing on archival sources, Mehra throws important new light on an area that continues to be of international importance in the late twentieth century.
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PARSHOTAM MEHRA holds the chair in History and is Head, Department of Central Asian Studies in the Panjab University at Chandigarh. He took his M A and PhD degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, having earlier taken M A degree in History from the Panjab University, Lahore. A widely travelled scholar, he has been to most parts of the world in addition to having first-hand acquintance with his own country.
Professor Mehra has lived and taught in the erstwhile North-West Frontier Province of British India, has been to Afghanistan and its principal cities of Kabul, Ghazni and Kandahar.
His earlier works which have received critical appreciation both at home and abroad include The Younghusband Expedition: An Interpretation, Asia, 1968; The Mcmahon Line & After, Macmillan, 1974 and Tibetan Polity, 1904-37, Otto Harrassowitz, 1976. |