The motivations for imperial advance have, over the years, caused considerable debate among historians. It has been thought by some that a law of the turbulent frontier forced the expansion of empire, for a region of order surrounded by an area of disorder had eventually, for its own protection, to conquer the area of turbulence. Thus, empires would inexorably advance their borders until they reached some great natural barrier or the frontiers of another stable power.

More than one-third of the area of Britain's Indian empire and over one-quarter of its population were ruled by the Indian princes. But despite its size, princely India has largely remained the province of the pulp journalist to whom we owe our hackneyed view of the princes as a bizarre assortment of spendthrifts, torturers and voluptuaries. Recently, serious scholars have begun to publish material on the princes, but the focus has mainly been upon the more backward states.

In this paper I wish to illustrate the hypothesis that a necessary co-relate of stable social order is a system of controlled conflict. In other words, a social system depends for its cohesion on the existence of conflicts in smaller sub-systems, provided that the conflicts are conducted within an accepted convention. Hence faction-feuds in a social system are not necessarily evidence of fission in that system but may also be evidence of fusion. I wish to illustrate this theme, what Gluckman called ‘The peace in the feud’, from evidence from Calcutta in the nineteenth century.

‘In England every piece of land is owned by someone—an individual, a public body, a company or perhaps by the crown. In India this is not so.’ Thus writes, in his unpublished reminiscences, a British ICS Officer who acquired experience of revenue work in the United Provinces and Bengal in the course of his career in India from 1915 to 1946.

One interesting aspect of the Revolution of 1911 in China was the role of the new-style army. The new-style troops, as one category of revolutionary activists distinct from the civilian radical intellectuals, determined the opening phase of the revolution, initiating the Wuchang uprising and bringing pressure to bear on most of the provincial leaders. Their contribution was the physical strength which the revolutionary intellectuals, who provided the ideology, lacked. The army played its vital role, not in the beginning of the revolutionary movement, but at a later stage when the prevailing order had been discredited and the imperial government had lost the allegiance of the people. Indeed, the success of the revolution reflected the interaction between revolutionary ideas and military power.