The Kashmir dispute has dominated Indo-Pakistan relations ever since the Transfer of Power over forty years ago; and it has played a major part in the genesis of the Sino-Indian coundary dispute. Alastair Lamb, on over basis of research carried on over thirty years, examines the history of this dispute from its remote origins in the first half of the 19th century, when the State of Jammu and Kashmir was created by the British sale of Kashmir to the raja of Jammu Gulab Singh, until the spring of 1990. When India and Pakistan appeared to be on the verge of the fourth armed conflict over this contested inheritance from the Britisg Raj.