Bangladesh

The territory of present-day Bangladesh, the deltaic land of the lower Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, has been continuously settled since prehistory and entered recorded history through the Bronze and Iron Age cultures of eastern South Asia. Ancient Greek and Indian sources refer to the polity of Gangaridai, a powerful kingdom on the lower Ganges around the fourth century BCE. The region known as Vanga, Pundra, and Samatata produced flourishing urban centres such as Mahasthangarh and Wari-Bateshwar and was incorporated, in whole or in part, into the Mauryan and later Gupta empires. From the eighth to the twelfth centuries the Buddhist Pala dynasty ruled much of Bengal and patronised the great monastic universities of Somapura and Vikramashila, before giving way to the Hindu Sena dynasty.

Muslim rule arrived with Bakhtiyar Khalji's conquest of western Bengal in 1204, beginning more than five centuries of Islamic governance. After a period under the Delhi Sultanate, an independent Bengal Sultanate emerged in 1352 under Ilyas Shah and presided over a distinctive Indo-Islamic culture and the spread of Islam in the eastern delta. The Mughal Empire annexed Bengal in 1576 under Akbar, and Dhaka became the provincial capital in 1610, growing into one of the wealthiest cities of the early modern world through the muslin and silk trade. Mughal authority devolved during the eighteenth century to the Nawabs of Bengal, whose defeat by the British East India Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 brought the region under colonial control.

Under British rule Bengal was the cradle of company power and, later, of the Bengal Renaissance. The first partition of Bengal in 1905 was reversed in 1911 amid mass protest, but at the end of British India in 1947 Bengal was partitioned again along religious lines, with the Muslim-majority eastern portion joining the new state of Pakistan as East Bengal, renamed East Pakistan in 1955. Resentment of West Pakistani political and economic dominance, and the suppression of Bengali language rights commemorated since the language movement of 1952, fuelled the rise of the Awami League under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

After the Awami League's 1970 election victory was set aside, the Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight on 25 March 1971, triggering a war of independence. Indian intervention in December 1971 forced the Pakistani surrender in Dhaka on 16 December, and the People's Republic of Bangladesh was established. The early republic was marked by famine in 1974, the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, and successive military regimes under Ziaur Rahman and Hussain Muhammad Ershad. Parliamentary democracy was restored in 1991, after which power alternated between the Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by Khaleda Zia, punctuated by a military-backed caretaker administration in 2007 and 2008.

Sheikh Hasina governed continuously from 2009 until August 2024, when a student-led mass movement against a public-sector job quota system escalated into broader protests that forced her resignation and departure from the country. An interim government headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took office to oversee reform and prepare new elections. Bangladesh today is a unitary parliamentary republic under the constitution of 1972, with a ceremonial president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government, providing the institutional setting for the contemporary political, military, and economic profile that follows.