The first histories of Punjab in the modern sense were written by British administrators: Cunningham's History of the Sikhs in 1849, which cost him his political post because it criticised Lord Hardinge's handling of the Punjab, Griffin's work on the Punjab chiefs, and the district gazetteers.
Sikh historiography in Punjabi runs from Rattan Singh Bhangu's Prachin Panth Prakash in the 1840s through Giani Gian Singh in the nineteenth century to the twentieth-century professionals.
The modern scholarly tradition begins with Ganda Singh's documentary work and runs through Teja Singh, Hari Ram Gupta, J.S. Grewal, Indu Banga and others, largely based at Punjabi University, Guru Nanak Dev University and Panjab University.
Western scholarship from the 1960s brought different methods and produced the McLeod controversy.
Pakistani Punjab's own history has been written much less: the province's historiography there is thinner than India's, and Punjabi-language history writing in Shahmukhi is very limited.
There is no history of Punjab written from the archives of both halves of it, because no historian has been able to work in both.
The Persian chronicles, the Sikh gurbilas and rehatnama literature, the British gazetteers and settlement reports, and the twentieth century academic history are four separate bodies with different assumptions.
Ganda Singh and Teja Singh built the first modern Sikh historiography, the Punjabi universities extended it, and a substantial Punjab studies literature now exists in North American and British universities.
What is thin is history written from below: village records, family papers, oral testimony and the working population's own account of the last two centuries.