Why were Maoists not as successful in certain states within India with former princely states and zamindari tenure? Examples are Kerala formed out of princely states Cochin and Travancore and Malabar district with zamindari land tenure, and also Karnataka, which includes the former princely state of Mysore. What explains these exceptional cases? Qualitative analysis using historical data shows that these are not really exceptions but rather influential cases where “apparent deviations from the norm are not really deviant, or do not challenge the core of the theory, once the circumstances of the special case or cases are fully understood.” To explain these influential cases, I use the typology of different types of princely states from Chapter 6 and demonstrate that Kerala and Karnataka had warrior or challenger states like Mysore or Travancore that resulted in higher levels of centralization and state capacity and less land inequality than the feudatory/tributary princely states in Chhattisgarh or the successor state of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh discussed in earlier chapters. A second reason the Maoists have not been as successful in Kerala and Karnataka was that land inequality was reversed due to progressive postcolonial political parties enacting land reforms.

What makes the chapters on Monsoon Asia unique is the analysis of the Dutch Empire from the point of view of Asian societies. First of all, it is stressed that, from a global point of view, the rise of the Dutch seaborne empire is part of a much wider and earlier coastal turn, which in Asia has been described as an Age of Commerce. It is not only European, but also Chinese and Islamic, expansion that characterises this phase of increasing maritime globalisation. Those Eurasian empires that continued to exploit the nomadic horsepower of the Eurasian Arid Zone were soon able to incorporate this maritime dynamic. In these empires, the Dutch retained a marginal presence as meek merchants subject to the whims of indigenous brokers and local governments. In other, more tropical parts of Asia, the aggressive operations of the Dutch prevented indigenous states such as Mataram and Kandy from incorporating the booming coastal regions of Java and Ceylon, respectively. In these insular areas, the Dutch were able to create territorial power and impose their monopoly on the production and sale of cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. In Maluku we can even speak of a Dutch ‘heart of darkness’ as much of its population was decimated, to be replaced by colonists and slaves. In almost all cases, the Dutch could sustain territorial power only with the help of overseas Chinese communities which offered both a vital urban middle class (primarily in the Dutch colonial headquarters of Batavia) and access to extensive commercial networks. So far completely ignored is the case of Ceylon. In this early-modern laboratory of colonial rule, the reformist policies of enlightened Dutch governors had a deep impact on the local society through mapping, law and education. One of the first revolutionaries in the late eighteenth-century Netherlands was a Tamil intellectual raised in Dutch schools in Ceylon.