Chapter 3 examines the evolution of caste and democracy.In doing so, it focuses on three aspects – the relationship between caste and electoral politics, the trajectory of caste-based reservations (affirmative action), and the link between development indicators and caste in the contemporary period. Though caste mobilization has indeed pluralized representative politics in India, substantial economic and social gains by the lower castes have been limited.

The last chapter is the Conclusion. After a brief overview of the book’s key themes, topics, and arguments, the chapter places India in a comparative perspective and asks the following questions. How analogous are political and economic trends in India when compared to similar countries? How do India’s achievements and shortcomings discussed in the book stand up against some other comparable countries?

Chapter 2 traces the growing sentimentalization of the Indian ayah in nineteenth-century British imagination. Mrs. Sherwood’s relationship with her Indian maidservants is explored through her voluminous missionary writings, which reveal the role of Christianity in shaping mistress–maid relations in the British Empire. The chapter then explores why, during moments of colonial violence, such as the 1806 Vellore Mutiny and particularly the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the Indian ayah’s fidelity to the white family became so important in British imperial imagination. In British visual and literary culture, particularly in missionary literature, the Indian ayah’s loyalty morally legitimized British colonial rule during the turbulence of Indian rebellions and later Indian anti-colonial nationalism. The period of growing sentimentalization of the ayah, however, was also a period of growing legal precarity for ayahs, with the relaxation of older legal paternalism and the disappearance of earlier gendered legal sympathy towards ayahs. Exploring cases of individual ayahs from legal archives, this chapter argues that the cultural veneration of the ayah’s fidelity concealed the vulnerability of real-life ayahs.

Chapter 7 analyzes changes in India’s important foreign relations, focusing on the post-Cold War period. The chapter argues that India’s approach to the world changed significantly in the post-1990 period, but has since then been marked mainly by incremental changes.

Chapter 4 first examines two societal groups – labor and women – and asks two questions. How have these groups fared since the 1980s? And how have they responded to top-down changes in India’s political economy? The final part of the chapter also discusses civil society activism and social movements more generally. As with Chapter 3, Chapter 4 highlights that the story of India since the 1980s is not wholly top-down. While the state and business remain dominant actors, societal groups have challenged and continue to challenge that domination.

Chapter 5 introduces readers to India’s regional diversity. The top-down and the bottom-up political changes in India discussed in Chapters 1 to 4 of this book are present more sharply in some parts of India than in others. In order to capture some of this variation, this chapter first provides some systematic comparisons of India’s states, including the context of Indian federalism and how that shapes center–state relations in India.

Following from the overview of regional diversity in the previous chapter, Chapter 6 discusses economic development and political change in four Indian states in turn: Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab.

Democracy is one of India’s great achievements. However, it is undeniable that Indian democracy has been under considerable strain in recent years. Chapter 1 analyzes these trends linked to Indian democracy and their underlying determinants. In particular, the chapter emphasizes the link between growing economic inequality and India’s recent democratic decline through two mechanisms – the decline of the Congress and the rise of the BJP under Modi.

In the 1870s and 1880s, a series of extradition cases between Hong Kong and Canton concerning the conflict between treaty obligations and colonial law threatened the very foundation of fugitive rendition laid out in the Treaty of Tianjin. A variety of solutions were attempted, such as demanding that the Qing change its laws on conviction and punishment, the suspension of the extradition clause of Article 21, or negotiating an empire-wide extradition treaty to replace the article. But none of these proposals were seriously entertained. In the meantime, to the local populations, the jurisdictional boundary between Canton and Hong Kong opened up an alternative arena of law and empowerment.

This chapter focuses on the legal ramifications of the rendition of Taiping Lieutenant Hou Yutian (mistakenly identified as Mo Wang) by the Hong Kong government to the Canton administration in 1865. This case was the first to reveal the tension between the Treaty of Tianjin (1858) and colonial law regarding fugitive rendition. The strong reaction of the British public to the execution of Hou by “lingering death” led to Britain’s amendment of its fugitive rendition procedure under the Treaty of Tianjin. The British government henceforth no longer considered “political offenses” as an extraditable crime to China and stipulated that no prisoner could be surrendered without a guarantee by the Chinese government of a “fair trial” and a pledge not to use any torture. While the Qing government accepted the amendment as an act of expediency, the British Foreign Office interpreted it as an acquiescence to British rules of extradition and the Political Offense Exception (POE).