These disparate territories were brought under a single state only in the nineteenth century. The unifiers were a clan of Dogra Rajputs from Jammu who conquered Ladakh in the 1830s, acquired the vale of Kashmir (hereafter ‘the Valley’) from the British in the 1840s and moved into Gilgit by the end of the century. And thus the state of Jammu and Kashmir (hereafter ‘Kashmir’) came to share borders with Afghanistan, Chinese Sinkiang and Tibet. Only a very narrow tract of Afghan territory separated it from the Soviet Union.
