This chapter explores the formation of an early ‘constitutionalist’ liberal current, by concentrating on Greek political economy. It starts by discussing the diffusion in the Greek world of an economic idiom, inspired by J. B. Say and Saint-Simonism, that concentrated on values such as industriousness and frugality as the organising principles of economy and society. It shows how this idiom complemented that of ‘public economy’ that informed Bavarian policies. The chapter then turns to Ioannis Soutsos, discussing how, from the 1840s onwards, he raised concerns about the obsession with economic virtues and argued for the benefits of institutional change and political participation. Drawing on the republican thought of Simonde de Sismondi and Pellegrino Rossi, Soutsos related industrie to political rights, called for large-scale reforms (including land redistribution) and associated political economy with the science of government. These calls increasingly targeted the monarchy, as reforms ground to a halt and the issue of land took on explosive dimensions. The chapter shows that ideas about state intervention in the economy and the view of economics as a science of government remained in fashion long after 1848, when they had lost their appeal elsewhere.

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.

The book ends by asking if there are any policy implications of my theory based on colonial institutions. A likely criticism of my theory is that the structural conditions created by colonialism are persistent and sticky and cannot be changed by the government. I show there are policy implications, for example, if political parties are really committed to land reforms as in Kerala and Karnataka, they can reverse some of the pernicious effects of indirect rule and indirect land tenure. Another possible critique of my theory is whether it can explain recent violence patterns of the Maoist conflict. The level of Maoist violence has declined since 2013-14, and the number of surrenders by Maoist cadres has increased in recent years, but low-level violence and attacks against security forces continue. The Maoist insurgency falls into the pattern of low-intensity but persistent insurgencies like the Kashmir and northeast insurgencies in India. While my theory based on colonial legacies is supposed to explain only the initial spatial variation of insurgency, and not its expansion and patterns of violence, it allows us to explain persistence and historical recurrence of conflict.