Srinath Raghavan is professor of international relations and history at Ashoka University. He is the author of several books, including The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia (Penguin Random House India, 2018).
South Asia looms large in American foreign policy. Over the past two decades, the United States has invested billions of dollars and thousands of human lives in the region, to seemingly little effect. As Srinath Raghavan reveals in The Most Dangerous Place, this should not surprise us. Although the region is often regarded as peripheral to America's rise to global ascendancy, the United States has long been enmeshed in South Asia. For 230 years, America's engagement with India, Afghanistan and Pakistan has been characterized by short-term thinking and unintended consequences. Beginning with American traders in India in the eighteenth century, the region has become a locus for American efforts-secular and religious-to remake the world in its image. Even as South Asia has undergone tumultuous and tremendous changes from colonialism to the world wars, the Cold War and globalization, the United States has been a crucial player in regional affairs.
The definitive history of US involvement in South Asia, The Most Dangerous Place presents a gripping account of America's political and strategic, economic and cultural presence in the region. By illuminating the patterns of the past, this sweeping history also throws light on the challenges of the future.
'Raghavan's remarkable historical command yields a definitive, unrivalled account of America's long, ambivalent and ultimately transforming relationship with South Asia: a place of danger and treasure, and a strategic prize still to be won''Starting with the Raj, Srinath Raghavan's book is the first comprehensive history of the relations between the US and South Asia. It sheds new light on the role reversal between India and Pakistan as the main partner of Washington in the region. Based on original material, it is a truly remarkable
tour de force!''Srinath Raghavan, one of the very best diplomatic and military historians working on modern South Asia, has written an excellent and ambitious book. Deeply researched and elegantly written, the book is rich with insights on democratic foreign policy, nuclear proliferation and confrontation, Islamist resurgence, and more-shaping the political and social bonds between the last superpower and almost a quarter of humanity''We finally have an outstanding and most readable long history of US engagement with South Asia thanks to one of India's preeminent contemporary historians, Srinath Raghavan''This is one of the best histories of US engagement with South Asia offering a more nuanced and coherent perspective. Raghavan has burnished his reputation as India's leading contemporary historian and political analyst''One of India's finest modern historians . . . Raghavan's mastery has been in bringing together a vast trove of material to write this eminently readable history of the US in South Asia''Raghavan is to be commended for the rich temporal tapestry he has woven and it is a complex yet rewarding trapeze''The book is both sweeping and insightful . . . it is a definitive account . . . it is a fascinating story, told accurately and engagingly''Srinath Raghavan's broad and detailed swathe of the US-South Asia relationship beautifully brings out the inherent contradiction in the heart of US policy'
