Partitions in history refer to the territorial division of previously constituted political entities or formations. Partitions occur by political decisions made by states or by assemblies of states. Political formations sometimes collapse and their territories fragment, but these events come about from external attacks and internal forces and stresses within existing states. In the Post-War period the two most famous partitions, practically prototypical, were the partitions of British India and of Palestine.

The first one took place in 1947 and was carried out by the British viceroyalty in India, then headed by Lord Mountbatten, during the Laborite government of prime minister Clement Attlee in the UK. The partition of India was done with maps in a closed room by the British jurist sir Cyril Radcliffe. The basic cause for the Partition of India was that Muslims wanted a country separate from the mostly Hindu rest of India. The application of partition resulted in mass migrations from India to Pakistan and vice versa. There were reciprocal butcheries, mainly in the province of Punjab, and the eventual number of deaths was half a million, according to a high estimate.

The partition of Palestine was approved in 1948 by the Security Council of the United Nations as a result of the Jewish insistence of the creation of the state of Israel. It too was made on a map on in an attempt to create separate areas for Jews and Arabs. The Arabs outnumbered Jews by 3 to 1 and neither the Arab population of Palestine nor Arab states accepted the UN plan. A war ensued pitting mainly the surrounding Arab states--Egypt, Syria, and Jordan--against the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. The Jews had just emerged from the European Holocaust and Israel was seen as a land of refuge. They were better supplied than the Arabs and they outfought the Arab armies, except that of Jordan, resulting in that the greater part of Palestine was constituted as the state of Israel and the Arab populations that fled from the war became refugees in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Historical collapses were common in Antiquity. The first two Mesopotamian empires, Akkad (ca2340-ca2150) and the Babylonian empire of Hammurabi (ca1792-ca1595), came apart from external pressures. Historical China practically began with the Zhou dynasty (1122), which was feudalized resulting in the formation of many separate large fiefs. In India, Magadha was the center of an empire which reached its apogee under king Ashoka (ca268-ca233). The empire gradually disgregated.

Sri Vijaya (ca550-ca1250) was a maritime empire, sometimes called a thalassocracy. It had its base in southern Sumatra but extended to Java and much of modern Indonesia. Sri Vijaya fragmented from external attack and internal disunion. Islam (632-762) was an empire ruled from Damascus. When a new dynastic capital was established in Baghdad, the wilayas or provinces of Islam went their separate ways. In our times, the two most famous collapses were those of Yugoslavia and the USSR, both in 1991.

The Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great (338-323) built a huge but ramshackle empire that extended as far as India. When he died, his most capable generals fought the Diadochi wars (323-281) which dismembered the empire resulting in the formation of Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid empire (centered in Syria but claiming the entire Middle East), and Macedonia including Greece.

The Roman empire was first partitioned by Diocletian (284-305), who abdicated in favor of two rulers, called augustuses, seconded by two caesars. In principle, the empire was intact, but in reality it was already coming unwound. Constantine the Great (324-337) eliminated all rivals for power within the empire, but the Roman empire could not be centrally ruled because of its extent and the barbarians besieging it in western Europe, so he divided it into two halves, one in the west, with its capital in Rome, and one in the east, ruled from Constantinople, founded by the eponymous emperor in the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. Even though the Roman empire still existed as a political entity--the incumbent emperor in either the West or the East was empowered to name the emperor in the other half--it was in effect partitioned. The western empire crumbled under the pressure of the barbarian, mainly German, invasions. The eastern empire lasted for many more centuries until Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

As a result of the disintegration of the western empire, Europe was divided into independent kingdoms with a tendency to savage succession struggles. It was a dynastic dispute that gave way to the invasion of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain by Muslims from Morocco (711).

The Franks were the most Latinized of the Germanic invaders of western Europe. Italy was invaded by the Lombards, who became a menace to the papal see in Rome. The greatest of the Frankish kings was Charlemagne (764-814), who descended on Italy at the height of his power and crushed the Lombards. Italy was partitioned into a papal state and various Lombard duchies. It was not to be reunited until the 19th century.

The Christian Spaniards began the Reconquista--the recovery of all of Spain from the Muslims--practically when the tide of Islam stopped at the foot of the Cantabric mountains. But Christian Spain, like its Muslim counterpart (Al Andalus), tended to be disunited. A king of Navarre, Sancho the Great (1000-1035), unified all of Christian Spain under his personal rule. Sancho partitioned Christian Spain among his heirs into Leon, Castile, and Navarre itself.

When Spain was finally fully brought under Christian rule in 1492, it embarked on overseas exploration and conquest beginning with Christopher Columbus' discovery of America. (America had actually been first reached by the Europeans in the person of the Vikings, but these only made one known and precarious settlement in Newfoundland.) Spain's maritime thrust was towards India, which was also Portugal's goal. Spain and Portugal became accidental rivals because Spain initially thought America was India, when in fact Portugal arrived at the real India first. When soon the Spaniards were disabused of their error, both powers thought they were masters of the non-European, non-Christian world. Thus arose the most ambitious as well as the most unrealistic and hubristic partition in history.

Portugal and Spain asked Alexander VI in effect to divide most of the world for them, to which this famously lascivious pope acceded. By the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) an imaginary line was drawn 100 leagues west of the Portuguese Cape Verde islands: east of it all heathen lands were Portugal's and to the west they were Spain's. The intention was obviously to give Spain rights over the entire Western Hemisphere and to confer Asia on Portugal.

All of this was, like the partition line, purely imaginary. Neither Spain nor Portugal possessed the means to control domains the vastness of which they ignored. Besides they did not even respect Tordesillas. The Portuguese asked the pope to reconsider and he obliged by placing the line so much further west that it cut through the hump of Brazil. The Portuguese must have known this, although they pretended to ignore it. When by the chance of the southerlies, which their ships had to catch by sailing far to the west of Africa, they supposedly stumbled on Brazil they acquired a big landing in the Western Hemisphere. Spain for its part claimed the Philippines, which were well within the Portuguese fancied world empire.

While Rome crumbled, at the other end of the world the Chinese Han empire was fragmenting into three large kingdoms. After a brief reunification, China was invaded by the Xiongnu led by the Shanyu of the Five Hordes (316). China was shattered into many simultaneous and successive minor dynasties. It was to remain fragmented until the Sui unification (589), soon replaced by the Tang dynasty (618-906). When the Tang empire disintegrated, China was in effect partitioned by barbarian invaders into a northern part, including Beijing, and a southern part, which was most of China. Northern China remained under the rule of various Sinicized dynasties and the rest of China was governed by the Song dynasty (979-1277).

In Mongolia, an exceptionally competent as well as exceptionally cruel and vindictive warlord, Jenghiz Khan (1206-1227), unified all the Altaic (Mongol and Turkic) clans and tribes and embarked on a conquest of the world. Under Jenghiz the Mongols went as far as Persia. Before he died, Jenghiz divided his empire into ulus for his heirs under the supreme rule of a great khan. The next-generation Jenghizids began warring upon each other and the unitary empire divided into four huge, independent successor empires: the Mongol empire proper, which, under Kublai Khan, conquered China and founded the Yuan dynasty (1277-1368); the Chaghataite khanate, which extended from Siberia to Afghanistan, and tried unsuccessfully to conquer northern India; the Ilkhanid Persian empire; and the Golden Horde, which made European Russia its vassal.

The power of the Mongols waned, mainly because there were not enough Mongols to go around and there were plenty of Turks to replace them, but the prestige of Jenghiz was undiminished. A Persianized Turk who claimed Jenghizid descent, Timur (iron), better known as Tamerlane (1365-1405), emulated the Mongols in conquering lust, although his conquests did not match those of the Mongols in extension. Long before this, all Turks had become Muslims. Timur's empire was built on the concept of jihad or religious war, although the objects of his insatiable warring fury were mostly Muslims. From Samarkand, his capital, Timur conquered as far as Damascus and Smyrna (a Christian fortress). He destroyed Delhi in an orgy of bloodshed. But his empire was even more fragile than that of the Mongols and on his death, which cut short his project to invade Mongolia and China, his immediate successors could not prevent the empire from total, piecemeal dismemberment. This was both partition and collapse.

With his coronation as emperor, Charlemagne had a claim on being the successor of the Roman emperors of the west. His empire had been initially partitioned by the treaty of Verdun into what became basically France and Germany, although before this happened there were other treaties which made the separation of these two countries irrevocable.

France was at first a minuscule kingdom that gradually became a large centralized state. Germany, however, was divided into large duchies. But it was a German Carolingian who had last claimed a very disunited Italy and it was from among the German duchies that arose a king, Otto the Great (936-973), who had himself invested by the papacy as Holy Roman emperor. Thus, the predecessor of modern Germany was for many centuries the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1152-1190) did not so much partition the empire, which had not really overcome its disunited ducal origins, as subdivide it and shift dynasties about, but this made any possibility of unification impossible.

Emperor Charles IV did a partition, not of the empire, but of sovereignties affecting the empire. For various centuries, the emperors tried to subjugate Italy and the popes meddled in imperial successions. In his Golden Bull of 1356, Charles virtually renounced the empire's claim on Italy and curtailed papal intervention in German politics. Although its extent was more or less defined, the empire remained as divided as ever.

When Luther preached the Reformation (1517), his message fell on plowed land: the princes chose sides for or against Rome, which had retained certain religious privileges, and the confrontation culminated in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), one of the bloodiest in European history. By then the Habsburg had obtained what was called the "hereditary elective" imperial crown. Their capital, Vienna, was barely inside the empire's frontiers. Habsburg interests did not necessarily coincide with those of the empire, which did not disintegrate but was basically a political phantom.

The Byzantine empire, the successor of the Roman Empire in the East neither collapsed nor was partitioned. It gradually lost territory in the Balkans to native Slavs and invading Bulgars and in the Near East and Anatolia to the Ottoman Turks, who initially tagged along with Seljuk hordes. The Ottomans were assigned northwestern Anatolia, which they wrested from the hoary Byzantine empire, whose fall they finally achieved crossing the Hellespont and conquering the Balkans. It was the induction of children from Christian families in the Balkans to form the loyal corps of janissaries which permitted the Ottomans to incorporate the lands which had once been part of the empire of Islam.

In time the janissaries became a liability. They did not modernize but acquired great political influence. As the 19th century advanced the Ottoman empire became a basket case among the great powers. The partial partition of the empire happened in the Congress of Berlin (1878), convened to curb Russia's influence in the Balkans after it conclusively defeated ineffectual Ottoman defences. At Berlin, the spontaneous separatist trends in the Balkans were ratified, except for the creation of Bulgaria, which Russia sponsored and the other powers opposed. Mainly Serbian Bosnia and Herzegovina was placed under Austrian administration. The Ottomans retained sovereignty over a strip of Balkan territory from the Black sea to the Adriatic sea anchored by two fortified places: Edirne in the east and Janina in the west.

One century before these events, there had occurred the most famous territorial partition in pre-20th-century European history. Poland was an ancient kingdom, the equal in pedigree of any western European state. In 1386, Poland and Lithuania came under one ruler. This dynastic fusion was formalized by the Union of Lublin (1569), which subsumed Lithuania under Poland but at the expense of centralized rule. The Polish parliament, called the Sejm, curtailed monarchical power. Within it, the land-owning nobility exercised the liberum veto by which one single opposition vote could sink any legislative initiative including financial requirements. As the Polish and Lithuanian nobilities constituted a relatively high percentage of the population, in comparison, for example, with France or Spain, Poland was the most democratic kingdom on earth, which put it at a disadvantage in respect of neighboring autocracies Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In 1772, at the instigation of Frederick the Great of Prussia, these three powers took chunks of Polish territory. As Poland saw its existence threatened, it tried to rationalize its government in 1791. This antagonized the land magnates who practically invited a Russian take-over (1793). In 1795, what remained of Poland was divided with Russia taking the heartland, Prussia the west, and Austria the south. Poland ceased to exist until 1918.

Nearly contemporaneous with the Congress of Berlin was the partition of the continent of Africa at the Conference of Berlin (1884-1885). In northern Africa, Algeria had been conquered by France and Egypt was a British protectorate which extended to the Sudan. Southern Africa was divided between the British colony around Cape Town and the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Congo river was explored by Henry Morton Stanley for king Leopold I of Belgium. Ethiopia and Liberia were weak independent states. The rest of Africa was "blockaded" by the European occupation of enclaves along the African coast. That was a vast amount of land, comparable in size to the Mongol empire or the USSR, and it was there for the taking by the European powers, which was what they decided on paper at Berlin without much wrangling. The partition was done at the instigation of Germany, who wanted colonies just like France and the UK, and it obtained the territories of contemporary Namibia, Tanzania (minus Zanzibar), Rwanda, and Burundi.

The model for the Congress of Berlin was the Congress of Vienna (1815), which did some partitioning, or more accurately, some re-apportioning of territories, but mainly what it did was to fix France's borders and interdict republicanism all over Europe. The Congress of Berlin, which thought it had settled the Balkan question, had actually made it a powder-keg. The territory that the Ottoman empire still held in the Balkans was coveted by Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria. The administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria was resented by Serbia. In 1912-1913, the Balkan states reduced Janina and Edirne and expelled the Ottomans from their remaining Balkan possessions. Edirne was returned to Istanbul but Janina was absorbed by Greece. Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Austria had incorporated outright in 1908, remained an intractable issue and it was on this account that a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Prinkip, assassinated Joseph Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg empire, thus striking the spark for World War I.

The greatest partition in the 20th century occurred in the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920) and it involved the Habsburg empire out of which emerged three independent states (Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) and parts of Yugoslavia which are today independent states (Slovenia and Croatia). In the midst of World War I, the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Soviet Russia and Germany constituted a sort of partition in the sense that the Soviets had to relinquish Poland, which remained under German control until the war ended with Germany's capitulation and Poland became independent.

In Yalta and Potsdam there separations of spheres of political influences in Europe with the recognition of the USSR's hegemony in eastern Europe and the Balkans, except Greece. Yugoslavia bolted from the Soviet informal empire in 1947. There were two specifically territorial partitions. The Allies were urging the USSR to declare war on Japan, which it finally did after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Soviet troops occupied North Korea, which was constituted as a communist state in opposition capitalist South Korea. The partition of Germany was not intended as such. Its occupation was divided into four zones, one of which, eastern Germany, was held by the USSR. When the Cold War started with the blockade of Berlin, the occupation of all of Germany resulted in the formation of two states: the Federal Republic of Germany and the communist Democratic Republic of Germany. This partition was reversed upon the collapse of the Soviet empire.