The radio crackles over Karachi’s harbour, and the date on the calendar is 14 August 1947. In the same hour, the new state of Pakistan comes into being from the Muslim-majority eastern and northwestern regions of British India, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah at its head and Liaquat Ali Khan soon named the first Prime Minister. The birth is not gentle. Partition unleashes an immense migration, with millions moving across the new border and terrible violence in Punjab, Kashmir, and Sindh.

But Pakistan did not begin in 1947. Its land held Mehrgarh in Balochistan nearly 8,500 years ago, the Bronze Age cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and the Buddhist world of Gandhara and Taxila. Over centuries the region passed through the Achaemenids, Mauryas, Kushans, Mughals, and then the British Raj from 1858. Karachi was taken in 1839, Sindh in 1843, and by 1893 the whole of modern Pakistan lay inside British India.

The idea of a separate homeland took shape in the 1930s. In January 1933, Choudhry Rahmat Ali published Now or Never and coined the name Pakistan from Panjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah answered the Nehru Report with his Fourteen Points in March 1929, and Allama Iqbal called for the Muslim-majority lands of north-west India in his 29 December 1930 address. Then came the Lahore Resolution of 1940, presented by A.K. Fazlul Haque, and the Muslim League’s victory in the 1946 elections.

On the evening of 3 June 1947, Lord Mountbatten announced the partition plan to Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru. Pakistan was formally established on 14 August, then a dominion of the Commonwealth, before adopting a republican constitution in 1956 and becoming an Islamic republic. Jinnah died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948, and the new state quickly learned how fragile its foundations were. The first war with India over Jammu and Kashmir followed in 1947 to 1948.

The next decades swung between civilian rule and military power. Iskander Mirza imposed martial law in 1958, Ayub Khan presided over a period of growth, and the 1965 war with India brought economic strain. In 1971, after the refusal to transfer power to the Awami League in East Pakistan, Operation Searchlight and the civil war ended with the creation of Bangladesh. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto then moved Pakistan towards a new constitution, and in 1972 the country began its nuclear programme, later accelerated after India’s test in 1974.

General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in 1977, deepened Islamisation, and aided the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War. Benazir Bhutto became the first female Prime Minister in 1988, but instability returned through the 1990s, ending in the Kargil War of 1999 and Pervez Musharraf’s coup. Pakistan carried out its own nuclear tests in 1998, and by the 21st century it stood as a nuclear-weapons state with the world’s seventh-largest standing armed forces.