EVENTS

About the speaker

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard is a Lecturer in Twentieth-century International History at the King’s College London. She is a historian of modern South-Asia and its global and regional environment, with broad interests in: international and transnational relation in the post-colonial world; South Asia and the Indian Ocean; frontiers, borders and borderlands; decolonization; state-making and nation-building.

Abstract

The talk will focus around the speaker’s new book, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-62. Almost 55 years have passed since the War of 1962. To this day, the conflict is remembered as a traumatic defeat for India. But is this all there was to the war? Were the roles of winner and loser so clearly divided between China and India?

In her new book, Shadow States, historian Bérénice Guyot-Réchard argues there is another way to understand 1962, as the outcome of a protracted struggle between China and India for the hearts and minds of Himalayan people. On that count, military victory did not give China what it wanted. Beijing might have won the war, but it also lost the peace.