The Architect of Two Partitions or a Federalist Daydreamer? The Curious Case of Reginald Couplan

What was the connection between the pre-1945 partition proposals for Ireland and Palestine, and the British imperial federalist vision? How do we move beyond comparative politics towards a transnational history of partitions? In this paper, Professor Dubnov begins to answer these questions by looking at Sir Reginald Coupland (1884-1952), the prolific author of the three major partitions that changed the contours of the British Empire during the first half of the twentieth century. Setting Copland against the backdrop of imperial federalist thought originating in the Victorian era, Dubnov argues that despite its top-down image, partition in fact resulted in intimate dialogue between the metropole and the periphery. This portrait reveals partition less as a single idea and more as a set of interrelated theories that included new notions of ethnic "un-mixing," population exchange, and sovereignty. Such a reconceptualization underscores the historical specificity of the three partitions of Ireland, India and Palestine, and permits us to re-evaluate their enduring legacies.

Arie M. Dubnov is a Senior Lecturer at the School of History and the Department of General History at the University of Haifa, Israel and, starting January 2017, will serve as the inaugural Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University.