Khanate of Kalat

The Khanate of Kalat, also known as the Brahui Confederacy, was the first unified polity of Balochistan, ruled from the fort town of Kalat by the Brahui Ahmadzai dynasty. It was formed in 1666 when Mir Ahmad Khan I gathered the nomadic Brahui tribes and declared independence from Mughal suzerainty as Mughal expansion reached its height. He captured Quetta, Mastung and Pishin from the governor of Kandahar and spent his reign fighting the Afghans and the Kalhoras of Sindh. His successors enlarged the state: Mir Samandar Khan took it to Karachi and was rewarded with the port, and Mir Abdullah Khan pushed it from upper Sindh to Bandar Abbas in Persia. Under Mir Nasir Khan I, who ruled from 1749 to 1794, it reached from Kerman in the west to Sindh in the east and from the Helmand to the Arabian Sea, though he spent much of his reign fighting the Durrani empire he had briefly served. In the early nineteenth century the khanate lost ground to Qajar Iran and Afghanistan and its capital was sacked by the British in 1839. After the Treaty of Kalat of 1875 it became a self-governing princely state in subsidiary alliance with British India, briefly independent in 1947 and 1948 before acceding to Pakistan, and it was abolished in 1955.