Alastair Lamb

Alastair Lamb (1930–2023) was a British diplomatic historian who authored several books on the Sino-Indian border dispute and the Indo-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir. He also worked in archaeology and ethnography in Asia and Africa.

Life and career

Alastair Lamb was born on 9 January 1930 in Harbin, China. His father, Lionel Lamb, was a Sinologist and British consular officer posted to China. His mother Jean Lamb ''née'' MacDonald was Australian-born. During 1941–1942, his parents were interned by the Japanese occupation forces. Alastair was sent out to Britain to stay with his paternal grandfather, Harry Lamb, who was also a diplomat.

Alastair Lamb studied at Harrow and went to King's College, Cambridge in 1953. He graduated in history and followed it with a doctorate in 1958. He was a diplomatic historian by training. His thesis was on the history of the British Indian border, especially against Tibet, between the era of Warren Hastings and the 1904 British expedition. This work was published as ''Britain and Chinese Central Asia'' in 1960, later revised as ''British India and Tibet'' in 1986.

In 1959, Lamb moved to British Malaya where he was a reader of history at the University of Malaya for nine years. He also studied Malayan and Thai archaeological sites with Hindu and Buddhist heritage. Later he spent three years as a senior fellow in the department of history at the Australian National University.

From 1968 to 1972, he was a professor of history at the University of Ghana. He spent some time in the office of Pakistan's leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he worked as a reader of history at Hatfield Polytechnic in Britain.Authors
Roxford Books, retrieved 6 September 2017.

Lamb died on 15 March 2023, at the age of 93.

Research

Lamb's doctoral thesis on the history of the Younghusband Expedition was published in 1960 by Routledge & Kegan Paul as the book ''Britain and Chinese Central Asia: The Road to Lhasa 1761 to 1905''. The book was revised and published in 1986 under a new title, ''British India and Tibet: 1766-1910,'' by bringing it up to the events of 1910 based on newly released archival documents.

In the 1960s, Lamb studied Hindu and Buddhist sites in Kedah and southern Thailand in a series of papers.

When the China–India border dispute was getting critical in 1962, Lamb was conducting research in British archives in the Public Record Office and the India Office Library. Lamb has stated that he came across a number of documents in the archive which looked "rather different" from the versions published by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. Through the mediation of Dorothy Woodman, Lamb managed to meet a senior official in the Indian High Commission in London in order to bring these facts to India's notice. However, he stated the official was least interested. The more he checked the published Indian documents, the more convinced he became of "distortions and misquotations". Thus he came to the "reluctant conclusion", he said, that the Indian government was least interested in the historical accuracy of its territorial claims. This motivated him to write ''The China-India border'' in 1964, where he claimed he did his utmost to "play down the defects of the Indian published material". In 1966, he expanded the book into a large two-volume work titled ''The McMahon Line''.

Lamb also came to be recognised as an expert on the juridical and diplomatic history of the Kashmir dispute. He wrote his first book on the Kashmir conflict in 1966, titled ''The Crisis in Kashmir''. This was soon after the Second Kashmir War. In 1991, after the start of the Kashmir insurgency, he expanded it into a larger volume titled ''Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy''.

Reception

Journalist and scholar Andrew Whitehead cited Alastair Lamb among historians of eminence, whose work is however tarnished by partisan comment. Scholar Ian Copland has called him a "meticulous historian" with exhaustive research and eye for detail. Parshotam Mehra called him "a professional historian of great academic distinction". He stated that his work was thorough and painstaking even though it suffered from gaps in the presentation and interpretation.

Certain aspects of Lamb's claims related to India-China, such as India being an aggressor or Lamb's claims on the Shimla convention, have been countered by Bertil Lintner's book, ''China’s India War''.

''The McMahon Line''

Leo Rose called the book a "special pleading" rather than a scholarly work, which presents the Chinese position extremely well. Lamb points out rightly that China had never ratified the Simla Convention

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