The eighteenth century in India has generally been described as a period of great turbulence, characterized by march and counter-march, rising and falling fortunes, and bewildering political intrigue. Many historians, focusing on this aspect, have dismissed the century as merely an unsavory hiatus between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British domination. Yet there was more to the century than the march and counter-march of armies. The other aspect of the period was the emergence of strong successor states in Gujerat, Bengal, Oudhe, Malwa, Hyderabad, Mysore, and the Punjab. Recently, historians have begun exploring these successor states, looking both back towards the Mughal administrative and ideological heritage and forward towards their role as princely states in British India. There are also important issues within the century itself, such as the role of successor states in developing regional language and consciousness, and successor states as channels of economic and social mobility.

The only really unique feature of the Mappilla outbreaks which occurred in Malabar District during the period of British rule was that each attack was conducted as a kind of suicidal jihād, in which the Mappillas involved intentionally sought to become shahīds or martyrs for the faith. No other South Asian Muslims who took part in protest movements to achieve goals similar to those which underlay the Mappilla attacks resorted to suicidal jihāds as a means of coercion. Yet no satisfactory explanation has ever been given to account for the Mappillas' peculiar militancy. Modern scholars have generally ignored the question, while the few British officials who tried to answer it usually argued, or implicitly suggested, that the attacks represented the inherent fanaticism of Islam. This explanation is, of course, vitiated by the very uniqueness of the Mappillas' suicidal ritual.

In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works. Very often therefore truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like exposures rather than objective statements, … For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors' claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his ordinary working equipment.

In recent years, studies of the mechanics of European colonialism in Asia and Africa have largely focused on the creation of collaborative systems and dependent economic structures within the colonized societies. The part that troops played in carving out a colonial territory and crushing primary resistance is often described, but seldom do accounts of colonial rule examine in detail the means of coercion employed to maintain a favourable political and economic environment. If, however, it is even partly true that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then discussion of colonial situations must take into consideration the role that the régime's armed agencies played in containing indigenous political movements and in themselves constituting one of the principal pillars of collaboration.

At a very early stage in their respective careers, most of the major iron and steel plants of Europe and North America recognized the strategic importance of possessing colliery capacity in order to safeguard their requirements of coking-coal, a basic input to the blast furnace. In the Ruhr—where the tendency towards vertical integration probably reached its apotheosis—the Huttenzechen (tied mines), accounted for nearly twenty per cent of the total coal output at the turn of the century and no less than fifty per cent during the inter-war period. The precise legal standing of the integrated units naturally varied from country to country. In Britain and Germany, for example, the most favoured practice was for the iron and steel plant to establish outright ownership of the mines and to treat them merely as a department of the enterprise complex itself, whereas in the United States, the giant steel works such as Kaiser, Republic, and Bethlehem, preferred to create semi-autonomous subsidiary companies. In India, the two steel firms ofthe pre- Independence era, i.e. the Tata Iron and Steel Company (henceforth abbreviated to T.I.S.CO.) and the Indian Iron and Steel Company (I.I.S.CO.), inclined towards the former organizational model (with the single exception of T.I.S.CO.'s West Bokaro colliery which was purchased in 1947 and was wholly owned by the Company's shareholders).