The history of Bangladesh

Bangladesh occupies most of the delta where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers meet the Bay of Bengal, one of the most fertile and densely settled landscapes on earth. For two thousand years the region formed the eastern part of Bengal, ruled in turn by Indian empires, Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, independent sultans and the Mughals, and it became one of the richest provinces in Asia. British conquest after 1757 brought famine, a colonial land system and, in 1947, partition, which made the delta the eastern wing of Pakistan. Bengali resentment of rule from the west led to the war of 1971, a genocide by the Pakistani army and the birth of an independent state. Since then Bangladesh has passed through assassinations, military rule, a long rivalry between two political dynasties and rapid economic growth, and in 2024 a popular uprising brought down its longest-serving government.

The shifting rivers of the delta have destroyed much of the early archaeological record, and in a land with little stone, early communities built with wood, bamboo and clay that rarely survive. The names of rivers and places suggest that the earliest inhabitants spoke Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Dravidian languages before Indo-Aryan speech spread from the west in the first millennium BCE. Their descendants include the many Adivasi peoples of today's Bangladesh, such as the Chakma and Marma of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Garo of the northern hills and the Santal of the north-west, who kept languages and religions of their own.

By the fifth century BCE rice farming supported towns and long-distance trade. At Wari-Bateshwar, north of Dhaka, archaeologists have found a fortified settlement with brick roads, iron working, glass and stone beads and early coins, evidence of trade reaching South-east Asia and, indirectly, the Mediterranean. Classical writers described a powerful people of the lower Ganges called the Gangaridai, whose reputation was said to have deterred Alexander the Great from marching further east in 326 BCE.

The oldest written record found in Bangladesh, a Brahmi inscription from Mahasthangarh in the north, shows that the town then called Pundranagara was a provincial centre of the Maurya Empire around the third century BCE. Bengal was the eastern frontier of the Mauryas, and later of the Gupta Empire, which held the western part of the region and received tribute from local rulers in the east in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. The delta was then divided into regions known as Vanga, Samatata, Harikela and Varendra, names that recur in inscriptions for centuries.

As Gupta power faded, Shashanka, king of Gauda, united much of Bengal in the early seventh century and fought the north Indian emperor Harsha. After his death the region fell into a period of disorder that later Bengali texts remembered as matsyanyaya, the law of the fish, in which the big devour the small.

Around 750 a council of chiefs chose Gopala as king, founding the Pala Empire. The Palas were followers of Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism, and under Dharmapala and Devapala in the late eighth and ninth centuries they ruled much of northern India from their base in Bengal and Bihar. They patronised the great monastic universities of Nalanda and Vikramashila, and Dharmapala built the Somapura Mahavihara at Paharpur, one of the largest Buddhist monasteries south of the Himalayas and now a World Heritage Site. Bengali monks such as Atisha carried Vajrayana teachings to Tibet. In the south-east, the Chandra dynasty ruled from Vikrampur, near modern Munshiganj, during the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Pala power declined after raids by the Chola emperor Rajendra I in the 1020s, and by about 1150 the Senas, a dynasty whose ancestors had come from Karnataka in southern India, had taken over. The Senas were strong patrons of Brahmanical Hinduism and the caste order, and some historians think the pressure they placed on Buddhist communities later made the eastern delta more open to conversion to Islam.

Arab merchants had brought Islam to the ports of the Bay of Bengal by the eighth century, but Muslim rule arrived from the north-west. In 1204 the Turkic general Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji, serving the Ghurid rulers who were establishing the Delhi Sultanate, took the Sena capital of Nadia and made Lakhnauti his seat. For more than a century Bengal was governed by often rebellious governors nominally loyal to Delhi. Fakhruddin Mubarak Shah ruled an independent state from Sonargaon in the east from 1338 and took the port of Chittagong, and in 1352 Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah united the whole of Bengal as a sovereign sultanate, beating off Tughluq armies sent from Delhi.

The Bengal Sultanate lasted almost two centuries. Its rulers built the vast Adina Mosque at Pandua, the mosque city of Bagerhat, associated with the saint Khan Jahan Ali, and the brick mosques of Gaur, and they patronised Bengali literature as well as Persian. Political history was turbulent: the Hindu landowner Raja Ganesha seized power around 1414, and in 1487 Abyssinian palace soldiers briefly took the throne. The Hussain Shahi dynasty from 1494 to 1538 is often remembered as a golden age, when the sultanate held Chittagong, Arakan's borderlands and parts of Assam and Orissa. Over these centuries much of the population of the eastern delta, especially the farmers who were clearing forest and marsh as the rivers shifted east, became Muslim, a process shaped by Sufi teachers such as Shah Jalal of Sylhet. Portuguese traders reached Chittagong in the early sixteenth century.

The Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri overran Bengal in 1538, and the province passed back and forth between Afghan dynasties until the Mughal Empire under Akbar defeated the last Karrani sultan in 1576. Conquest of the eastern delta took another four decades, as a confederacy of landlords known as the Bara Bhuiyan, led by Isa Khan of Sonargaon, fought the Mughals on the rivers. In 1610 the governor Islam Khan made Dhaka the provincial capital, naming it Jahangirnagar after the emperor Jahangir.

Mughal Bengal became the empire's wealthiest province, exporting rice, silk, saltpetre and the fine cotton muslin for which Dhaka was famous across Asia and Europe. The governor Shaista Khan drove Arakanese and Portuguese pirates out of Chittagong in 1666 and built much of old Dhaka, including work on the Lalbagh Fort. Dutch, English and French companies set up trading posts along the rivers. After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 central power weakened, and in 1717 Murshid Quli Khan made Bengal a hereditary governorship under the Nawabs, with its capital at Murshidabad in today's India.

The young nawab Siraj ud-Daulah tried to curb the English East India Company, which had fortified Calcutta, now Kolkata. Robert Clive conspired with the nawab's commander Mir Jafar and defeated Siraj at Plassey on 23 June 1757. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764 the Company received the right to collect Bengal's revenue, beginning the British Empire's rule in South Asia. Heavy taxation continued through drought, and the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 killed perhaps a third of the population of the province. In 1793 the Permanent Settlement fixed land revenue on a class of landlords, the zamindars, many of them Hindu, while the mostly Muslim peasants of the east became tenants with few rights. Bengal's textile industry was undermined by British imports.

Calcutta grew into the capital of British India and the centre of the Bengal Renaissance, a flowering of literature and reform associated with Rammohan Roy and later Rabindranath Tagore, while eastern Bengal remained largely rural and grew jute for the mills of Calcutta and Dundee. Muslim reform movements such as the Faraizi of Haji Shariatullah and the uprising of Titu Mir in 1831 challenged landlords and the colonial order. In 1905 the viceroy Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal, creating a province of Eastern Bengal and Assam with Dhaka as its capital. Many Muslims welcomed it; Hindu nationalists protested so fiercely that the British Raj reversed the partition in 1911. The All-India Muslim League was founded at a meeting in Dhaka in 1906.

In the 1930s and 1940s Bengal was governed by elected ministries, led first by A. K. Fazlul Huq, who moved the Lahore Resolution of 1940 calling for Muslim-majority states. During World War II the Bengal famine of 1943 killed around three million people, worsened by wartime policy and the loss of Burmese rice after Japan's invasion. Communal violence followed, with mass killings in Calcutta in August 1946 and in Noakhali later that year.

The Partition of India in August 1947 divided Bengal. Its Muslim-majority eastern districts, together with Sylhet, became East Bengal, renamed East Pakistan in 1955, separated from the rest of Pakistan by some 1,600 kilometres of Indian territory. Although East Bengal held a majority of Pakistan's population, power lay with the civil service, army and business elite of the west. When the government declared that Urdu alone would be the national language, students in Dhaka protested, and on 21 February 1952 police opened fire and killed several of them. The day is still commemorated, and UNESCO later made it International Mother Language Day.

The United Front swept the Muslim League from power in East Bengal in 1954, but its government was soon dismissed, and from 1958 Pakistan was under the military rule of Ayub Khan. In 1966 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League put forward a six-point programme for autonomy. He was charged with treason in the Agartala Conspiracy Case, but a mass uprising in 1969 forced his release and Ayub's resignation. In November 1970 the Bhola cyclone killed an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people, and the central government's slow response deepened anger. A month later, in Pakistan's first general election, the Awami League won 167 of East Pakistan's 169 seats and an overall majority in the National Assembly.

General Yahya Khan and the West Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto refused to let the assembly meet on Mujib's terms. On 7 March Mujib told a vast crowd in Dhaka that the struggle was now for freedom, and a province-wide non-cooperation movement followed. On the night of 25 March the army launched Operation Searchlight, attacking Dhaka University, police barracks and Hindu neighbourhoods. Mujib was arrested, and independence was proclaimed on 26 March. A government in exile was formed in April, and Bengali soldiers and volunteers organised as the Mukti Bahini fought a guerrilla war.

The Pakistani army and allied militias, the Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams, carried out a campaign of mass killing that is widely recognised as the Bangladesh genocide. Estimates of the dead range from 300,000 to three million, and between 200,000 and 400,000 women were raped. Hindus were particularly targeted, and in December militias murdered hundreds of teachers, doctors and writers. About ten million refugees fled to India. After Pakistani air strikes on India on 3 December, Indian forces entered the war alongside the Mukti Bahini, and on 16 December 1971 the Pakistani commander surrendered in Dhaka. The Cold War shaped the conflict: the Soviet Union backed India, while the United States and China supported Pakistan.

Mujib returned from a Pakistani prison in January 1972 to lead a shattered country. The 1972 constitution named nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism as founding principles, and Bangladesh joined the Commonwealth and, in 1974, the United Nations. Reconstruction was hampered by corruption, the violence of a paramilitary force and the famine of 1974. In January 1975 Mujib turned the country into a one-party state under a new party, BAKSAL. On 15 August 1975 a group of army officers killed him and most of his family in Dhaka; his daughters Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana survived because they were abroad. In November four senior Awami League leaders were murdered in Dhaka's central jail.

After a series of coups and counter-coups, the army chief Ziaur Rahman emerged as ruler. He founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in 1978, restored multiparty politics, encouraged private enterprise and labour migration to the Gulf, and gave Islam a larger place in the constitution. He was assassinated in Chittagong on 30 May 1981. In March 1982 General Hussain Muhammad Ershad seized power. His regime decentralised local government, privatised industry and in 1988 made Islam the state religion. Meanwhile an insurgency by the indigenous peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, resisting Bengali settlement on their land, continued from 1975 until a peace accord in 1997. In December 1990 a mass movement uniting students and both main opposition parties forced Ershad to resign.

Parliamentary government was restored in 1991, and for three decades politics was dominated by two women: Khaleda Zia, Ziaur Rahman's widow and leader of the BNP, and Sheikh Hasina, Mujib's daughter and leader of the Awami League. Khaleda governed from 1991 to 1996 and 2001 to 2006, and Hasina from 1996 to 2001, with neutral caretaker governments overseeing elections. A cyclone in 1991 killed about 140,000 people, but over these years Bangladesh steadily reduced poverty and birth rates, and garment exports, microfinance and remittances from workers abroad transformed its economy. A political crisis in 2006 led to two years of military-backed caretaker rule, during which both leaders were arrested.

Hasina returned to power in a landslide in 2008 and governed until 2024. Her government built large infrastructure projects, including the Padma Bridge, oversaw strong growth and set up a tribunal to try collaborators accused of war crimes in 1971. It also abolished the caretaker system, and the elections of 2014, 2018 and 2024 were boycotted or marred by violence and restrictions on the opposition; human rights groups documented enforced disappearances and attacks on the press. From 2017 Bangladesh took in more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing violence in Myanmar, and over a million now live in camps around Cox's Bazar.

In June 2024 student protests against quotas for government jobs grew into a national movement against Hasina's rule. Security forces responded with lethal force, and a later United Nations investigation found that as many as 1,400 people had been killed. On 5 August 2024 Hasina resigned and fled to India. The Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus became chief adviser of an interim government that promised reforms and in 2025 banned the Awami League's political activities. In November 2025 a Bangladeshi tribunal convicted Hasina in absentia of crimes against humanity over the crackdown and sentenced her to death; she rejected the verdict as politically motivated. Khaleda Zia died on 30 December 2025.

In the general election of 12 February 2026, held alongside a referendum on a reform charter and without the banned Awami League, the BNP won a two-thirds majority, with Jamaat-e-Islami second. Khaleda's son Tarique Rahman was sworn in as prime minister on 17 February 2026, governing a country of some 175 million people.