This chapter deals with the changing face of caste from the 1820s to the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how and why the conceptions of caste became so widely adopted in the course of the nineteenth century. The chapter explores the central paradox of the castelike social order: while colonial India's caste differences became widely spoken of as fixed essences of birth and rank, Indians kept finding ways to reshape and exploit them to meet conditions of change and insecurity. Historians of India's so-called subalterns have portrayed initiatives as assertions of anti-authoritarian resistance, especially when they took the form of collective action by low-caste or tribal people against landlords, money-lenders, or agents of the colonial state. Two distinct models of caste society had come into operation in the centuries immediately preceding the British conquest, with a leading role being played by the rulers of the precolonial period.

Assumptions about the nature and course of Indian economic history lie at the heart of many analyses of South Asia's recent past. The descriptions and explanations of the apparent lack of growth and development in the Indian economy produced during the colonial period itself were dominated by the nationalist critique of British rule and the imperial response to it. Modern studies of the transition to colonialism in India provide a rather different contrast between the economies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The analysis of dependent underdevelopment contends, like the nationalist critique of the colonial economy before it, that the British conquest was the chief reason for India's development problems over the last 200 years. The underlying characteristics of economic growth and development in colonial and post-colonial India were determined by the nature of the markets that decided how any surplus over subsistence was generated, and then divided it between capital, labour, and the state.