Who ruled Karachi?

Karachi lies on the Arabian Sea coast of Sindh, just west of the many mouths of the Indus. The river's delta is a shifting maze of creeks and silt, so harbours along it have repeatedly choked and died. Karachi grew because its bay, sheltered by Manora island, stayed deep. That natural harbour turned a small 18th-century trading post into a colonial port, then the first capital of Pakistan, and finally one of the largest cities in the world.

The coast was settled long before Karachi existed. Sites of the Indus Valley Civilisation lie in the hinterland, and fishing communities have used the bay for thousands of years. Greek writers recorded harbours nearby: Alexander the Great sent his fleet under Nearchus west from this coast in 325 BCE, and later Greek and Roman sources describe Barbarikon, a port of the lower Indus that traded with the Mediterranean world. A few dozen kilometres east, the ruins at Banbhore are widely identified with Debal, the port where the Arab general Muhammad ibn Qasim landed in 711 or 712 CE and began the conquest of Sindh for the Umayyad Caliphate. Debal declined as its channel silted up and was abandoned by the 1200s. Over the next centuries Sindh passed between local dynasties such as the Soomras and Sammas, the Delhi Sultanate, the Arghuns and Tarkhans, and from 1592 the Mughal Empire.

The modern city began around 1729, when merchants from Kharak Bandar, a nearby port that had silted up, moved to the edge of the bay and built a walled village known as Kolachi. Local tradition links the name to a fisherwoman, Mai Kolachi. Under the Kalhora rulers of Sindh and, from 1795, the Talpur Mirs, the town traded with Muscat, the Persian Gulf and western India. British forces landed and occupied it in February 1839, and when Charles Napier conquered the rest of Sindh in 1843, Karachi soon became its capital.

British rule transformed the town. Engineers dredged the harbour and built breakwaters, the first railway opened in 1861 and was later extended up the Indus to the Punjab, and the port boomed as an outlet for cotton and wheat, especially once the Suez Canal opened in 1869. By 1914 it was the largest grain-exporting port in the British Empire. Stone buildings, a cantonment and a mixed population of Sindhi, Gujarati, Parsi, Goan, Baloch and other communities gave it the character of a colonial port city. When Sindh became a province of its own in 1936, split off from the Bombay Presidency, Karachi was its capital.

The partition of India in 1947 changed Karachi more than any other event. It became the first capital of Pakistan, and most of its large Hindu and Sikh population left for India while hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees, many of them Urdu speakers, arrived from India. The population passed one million by 1951. The capital moved north in 1959, first to Rawalpindi and then to the new city of Islamabad, but migrants from every region of Pakistan kept coming. Since the 1980s the city has seen long periods of ethnic and political violence, along with rapid and largely unplanned growth.

Today Karachi has more than 20 million people. It is the capital of Sindh province, Pakistan's main seaport and the country's financial and industrial centre.