Region, religion, and locality: revisiting Punjab politics and the Unionist Party, 1923–1947

Abstract

This article revisits a series of articles published in the early 1980s on Punjab politics in the pre-partition decade that grew out of my thesis ‘The Growth of the Muslim League in the Punjab’ which was supervised by Francis Robinson. It initially locates the publications in the existing literature, before assessing the extent to which subsequent research has enriched academic understanding. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the conceptualisation of the Unionist Party's power-sharing as a form of consociationalism.