Pakistan's largest province is mostly desert, not farmland
Balochistan covers about 44% of Pakistan's land yet holds the fewest people, with only around 5% of the ground arable under an extremely dry climate. Agriculture and livestock still supply roughly 47% of its economy. The name means land of the Baloch, who migrated east from Kerman after seventh-century Arab conquests.
The province is a rugged plateau split into basins by steep ranges, bordering Iran and Afghanistan and facing the Arabian Sea at the deep-water port of Gwadar. Farming here is very old: on the Kachhi plain in the northeast, Mehrgarh ranks as the earliest known farming village of the era before the Indus civilisation. Greek writers who followed Alexander the Great knew the land as the Gedrosian desert, short of plants and water, and Alexander marched his army across it on the way back from India. In 302 BCE Seleucus I handed Gedrosia to the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta.
Under the Sasanians the region was split into units such as Makran and Tugran, and the Brahui, whose language is Dravidian, are considered descendants of its earliest inhabitants. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang found much of Makran Buddhist. Chach of Aror reclaimed it in 631 and supposedly marked his frontier with Kerman by planting date palms. An Arab army invaded in 644, but Caliph Omar, told of poverty and scarce water, forbade it to cross the Indus. Marco Polo later described Kij-Makran as the last kingdom of India.
Baloch people are first recorded in Kerman in the 10th century, and their large migrations came around 1300; folklore credits Mir Jalal Khan with leading forty-four tribes out of Persia. In the 15th century Mir Chakar Rind led another wave into the Punjab. The Brahui Khanate of Kalat rose in the late 17th century, and Nasir Khan I extended it across the whole region, winning Quetta from Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1751.
Britain brought Kalat and its neighbours under protection through the Treaty of Kalat in 1876 and gained Quetta and Sibi from Afghanistan in 1879. The 1935 earthquake flattened Quetta. At partition the Khan of Kalat hoped for independence but signed accession to Pakistan on 27 March 1948, after Las Bela, Makran and Kharan had already joined, and his brother Prince Abdul Karim rose in revolt.
Source: Balochistan, Pakistan
