Current crises facing Kashmiris and Rohingyas have analogous origins in the military reterritorialization of social spaces which had been formed over many centuries by patterns of mobility and settlement along Eurasian trade routes. Territorial identities in Kashmir and Arakan had combined sedentary and mobile features; mingling trade with farming; combining political and religious cultures in South, Central and Southeast Asia; and connecting East and West along trade routes around the Silk Road and Indian Ocean. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, complex, mixed, local populations — formed by many centuries of trade, migration, settlement, conquest, and mobility — became victims of imperial wars that defined modern nations in South and Southeast Asia. The forced incorporation of Arakan into what became Myanmar and Kashmir into what became India and Pakistan imposed upon Muslims in both these regions two versions of the marginalization and persecution that afflicts many peoples forced into rigidly nationalist territorial boundaries during the violent demise of modern empires and rise of national states.