The formation of “gunpowder empires,” extensive international maritime trade, and the emergence of commercialized consumer culture in parts of East Asia all mark the beginnings of an Early Modern age in roughly the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, products native to the Americas such as chili peppers, peanuts, and tobacco were already present in East Asia, and silver from the Americas flowed into China to pay for Chinese exports. But China, after 1644, fell under the rule of the Manchu Banner People from beyond the Great Wall in the northeast, who then expanded the empire to include Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Korea, meanwhile, had only limited foreign contacts during this period, and became pervasively Confucianized. Japan was reunified in the late sixteenth century following a period of division, and the great reunifier Tokugawa Ieyasu founded Japan’s last Shogunate in 1603. The Tokugawa Shogunate became a time of prolonged peace and relative isolation, during which significant economic developments helped prepare Japan for later industrialization and undermined the old hereditary socio-political order.

This chapter moves beyond the figure of the sole ruler into the dynamics of Macedonian and Qin society. Surrounding the figure of the ruler are subordinates and subjects of differing levels of power and authority. Major findings reinforce the nature of the extremely personal Macedonian governmental framework. The comparison of military practice is also revealing of an emphasis on killing greater among the Zhou than Greek armies, as the importance of captives, citizenship, and submission among the Greeks reveals a vastly different understanding of the cultural act of killing than exists among the Zhou. Incentivization is also examined, and the role of political personhood among the Greeks and Macedonians is highlighted as a means by which soldiers are incentivized to action.

A retired government employee who leads the protesting farmers’ platform named Bhal Bachao Samiti, Vijayrajsinh aptly articulated the role of the ‘sarkar’ in Dholera. He used ‘sarkar’ to refer to the state or the government. His struggle to find the sarkar to lodge his protests against land acquisition by the state sums up the importance of the ‘state’ in Dholera and, by extension, in such projects of urbanisation. It also signifies the hide-and-seek game the state plays with its citizens. From interviews with other stakeholders, especially farmers, two more themes emerge as they talk of the sarkar. First is the prevalence of the Dholera smart city or the Special Investment Region (SIR) project in the everyday lives of these citizens and how the character of the sarkar changed since the announcement of the project.

China was plunged into four centuries of almost continuous division following the collapse of the Han Dynasty. Most of the empires and kingdoms in north China during this period, moreover, had ethnically non-Han Chinese rulers. Despite the remarkably multiethnic character of the era, however, there was also considerable institutional and cultural continuity. A cosmopolitan elite culture took shape, which notably included originally South Asian Buddhism but also many Chinese political traditions and literacy in the written Chinese language, that was shared now throughout East Asia. While Korea during this period was neither unified nor uniform, and Japan was also just in the process of unifying, organized and fully historical states in both Korea and Japan first emerged in this period. Meanwhile, the nucleus of what would become Vietnam remained loosely part of empires based in China during these years.

M. Vijayanunni, who was now retired from the Indian Administrative Service, continued to advocate for a full caste-wise enumeration in the census in the lead-up to Census 2011. As the former head of the ORGI, or the Indian census bureau, Vijayanunni spoke from a unique position when he argued that the ORGI was the only agency with the technical experience to undertake the task. Vijayanunni's certainty stemmed from the technology available for cleaning, analyzing, and tabulating data and his detailed historical knowledge of censuses. If the colonial state could manually process, tabulate, and publish large volumes of caste and religion data, the ORGI was capable of completing a similar task in 2011. Vijayanunni argued that the question was not whether the ORGI had the capacity to do so, but whether it was willing to do so.

Politics was central in deciding the path forward. A coalition of organizations, activists, politicians, and public intellectuals— including Vijayanunni—came together to target a change in census policy on caste. This chapter describes the advocacy efforts to include a caste count in Census 2011, and then details the institutional backlash that followed the campaign's success. In examining the steps that executive bureaucrats and allied groups took to keep a caste-wise enumeration out of Census 2011, this chapter traces the strategies of bureaucratic deflection and how they reinforce castelessness in the census, the state, and beyond.

Securing the Concession: Caste Census to Document Systemic Inequality

Dilip Mandal had worked for several media houses as a writer, editor, and producer for more than fifteen years. His most recent position as managing editor for a national magazine had thrust him into the limelight. Mandal had broken a “glass-ceiling” by being one of a handful of journalists from an oppressed-caste background to enter the editorial ranks, yet his road to becoming a senior journalist had not been easy.

In October 2023, the Government of Bihar in northern India published the preliminary findings from its first state-wide caste survey and released a full report a month later. The findings from the survey led to immediate revisions in state-level reservation policy. At first glance, the recent case of Bihar offers an alternative, and more positive, ending to this book—which follows the case of a failed nationwide enumeration of caste in India. I argue in this book that the executive bureaucracy protected the invisibility of caste privilege when it blocked the inclusion of a caste-wise enumeration in Census 2011—a process I call bureaucratic deflection. The recent survey in Bihar actually supports this book's argument since one of the executive bureaucracy's most successful strategies to prevent a caste-wise enumeration in the decennial census has been to decentralize the project of enumerating caste to state governments. Bihar's political leadership undertook the survey after the central government failed to publish caste-wise data.

Building off the success of Bihar's caste survey, the opposition Congress party seeks to prevent the third successive term of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in office at the center with a national policy platform that includes a caste census during the 2024 parliamentary election. On the one hand, it feels disingenuous that Congress has chosen to rally around this issue—given its long history of excluding a caste-wise enumeration in the decennial censuses of independent India. The Congress leadership had every opportunity to collect caste-wise data in the Censuses of 1951, 1961, 1971, 1991, and 2011. In fact, this book details how the Congress leadership conceded to do so in the lead up to Census 2011 only to backtrack on its promise and push the project into a survey with a long history of producing poor quality data. The executive leadership—which switched from Congress to BJP in 2014—never published the caste-wise data collected as part of a revamped below poverty line (BPL) survey. Both dominant political parties have refused to collect caste-wise data once in power at the center and have supported the senior bureaucracy's seeming disdain for a caste-wise enumeration in the decennial census. In this policy area, they share a common history of using the promise of a caste census to secure votes but never implementing one.

Chapter 4 shifts its focus to the US-China institutional balancing within the economic domain and its consequences for the transformation of the economic suborder. It systematically examines the institutional balancing efforts between these two nations through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). The unintended consequences stemming from this institutional balancing between the United States and China within the economic sphere signal the emergence of a multifaceted network of economic institutions and initiatives that transcends the conventional “noodle-bowl” model, characterized by interwoven free trade agreements.

An ancient civilization emerged in the Red River delta of what is today northern Vietnam which, by about 500 BCE, was characterized by the production of magnificent bronze drums. The region fully entered recorded history, however, only after Chinese imperial conquests extended into the area beginning in 214 BCE. Soon afterwards the area became part of an independent kingdom called Southern Yue (Nam Viet). In 111 BCE, it was absorbed into the Han Dynasty. The Red River delta then remained loosely part of empires based in China until 938 CE, when a Cantonese invasion fleet was defeated, and the Red River area became an independent state called Dai Viet. In the thirteenth century Dai Viet heroically repulsed three Mongol invasions, and in the fifteenth century Dai Viet began to expand south into the land of Champa (today’s central Vietnam). By the eighteenth century, Viet rule extended to the far southern Mekong delta. Meanwhile, from the sixteenth century Vietnam was divided between northern and southern strongmen. A major rebellion that began in 1771 ended with the unification of the whole of Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty in 1802.

Vijayrajsinh, the leader of the protesting farmers in Dholera, often complained about how people from the BJP have captured the mamlatdar office (Block Development Office). According to him, they do not let any work happen without approval from the local BJP leaders. He claimed that the mamlatdar advised him to speak to the local BJP head to expedite the process of converting his agricultural land to non-agricultural land. Furious at this, Vijayrajsinh preferred to wait instead of talking to a ‘stupid’ from the BJP.

In the initial days of fieldwork, I viewed these stories usually targeted against the RSS or BJP with suspicion. After all, Vijayrajsinh was fighting against the BJP government in his opposition to the Dholera SIR project. However, spending time, one could witness the ubiquity of middlemen, brokers inside the government offices, and how each one of them was associated with the Hindutva organisations. Thus, these ‘men’ from right-wing Hindu nationalist organisations were part of the everyday state. For example, interviews with talatis working in and around the Dholera SIR villages that witnessed a massive spike in land prices underlined it. The talatis are government officials at the lowest echelons of bureaucracy in rural Gujarat tasked with duties such as maintaining crop and land records of the village, collecting tax revenue and irrigation dues in addition to delivering government-led development projects. In private, they agreed to have brokered land deals for private buyers, in many cases by using their past networks in Hindutva organisations. While their task as officials was to act as conduits to bring the state closer to citizens, their moonlighting was entirely against such a novel idea.

Similarly, in land deals, there is a ubiquity of private intermediaries usually referred to as dalals (brokers). Broker is used here to refer to the private agents or intermediaries who are not officially associated with the state. Under middlemen, I include both brokers and government officials who moonlight.