Was the nation-state inevitable?

I listened to the above on a podcast. To be frank it was a bit ho-hum. To non-brown listeners some of the stuff was surprising, but I had heard most of it elsewhere before, and Varsha Venkatasubramanian is not particularly heterodox, so her “UC Berkeley” affiliation immediately indicated a lot of her answers to the questions posed.

But I want to talk about one aspect of the discussion, and that is Venkatasubramanian’s understanding of the role that British colonialism played in the emergence of Pakistan and India.