Trade Networks Severed: The Economic Disintegration of the Pirpanjal Region After 1947

Abstract

This paper examines the economic consequences of the 1947–49 conflict for the Pirpanjal region of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, comprising the present-day districts of Poonch and Rajouri. Prior to Partition, this region functioned as an economically integrated zone whose trade, pastoral, and labour circuits extended westward toward 0Muzaffarabad and the Punjab plains as naturally as they extended eastward toward Jammu and Srinagar. The ceasefire line established in 1949, and its later designation as the Line of Control, bisected this zone without regard to its economic geography, severing seasonal grazing circuits, weekly and periodic markets, artisanal supply chains, and long-distance trade in timber, wool, and minor forest produce. Drawing on the historiography of Partition-era economic disruption and on the author's doctoral research into the socioeconomic history of Poonch and Rajouri between 1947 and 1989, this paper argues that the region's post-1947 economic trajectory should be understood not as a single rupture followed by recovery, but as a sustained process of disintegration and asymmetric reintegration into two separate, militarized state economies. It traces this process across three phases — the immediate rupture of 1947–49, the consolidation of a bordered economy through the 1950s and 1960s, and the entrenchment of economic marginality amid recurrent conflict through 1989 — and situates the region's limited, temporary trade reopening after 2008 as evidence of the durability, rather than the resolution, of this disintegration.