Divided lands, phantom limbs: partition in the Indian subcontinent, Palestine, China, and Korea.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bone on the contrary if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing other but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, leave out the business of unification and liberation.

George Bernard Shaw, Preface to John Bull's Other Island, 1904 (1)

In the immediate wake of Allied victory in the next to the first World War, the world lay in pieces. In