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 final chapter returns to the Indian subcontinent to reveal the durability of the Company’s expansion within the carapace of Mughal sovereignty by the mid-eighteenth century. Although traditionally understood as a period of Mughal decline, largely facilitated by the ‘rise’ of the Company, this chapter argues that the two were not mutually exclusive, and in fact the continued expansion of the Company within a Mughal framework contributed to the empire’s continued authority on the Indian subcontinent, as the networks of Company servants helped bind the emperor in Delhi to the regional nawabs into the 1750s. For example, the imperial farman of 1716 provided the Company with its greatest set of rights yet, including customs-free trade and the territorial expansion of most of its main settlements, such as Calcutta and Madras. The Company’s negotiations to implement these rights with the empire’s various regional governments served to embed the Company even further into these regions, even as the nawabs assumed greater local powers themselves. Many of these negotiations continued to be shaped by the private transcultural networks between Company servants and Mughal elites, and despite the emergence of a powerful and more capable British nation-state in the early eighteenth century, one that made various claims on the Company in Asia, these intimate and cross-cultural ties proved remarkably resilient.