Even without this wonderful sixteenth-century hyperbole, forts remain an impressive feature of India's landscape. A thoughtful traveller, seeing the jagged walls high above the road, might well wonder who built them, and when, and what events took place within the gates. Scholarly writing on the subject will disappoint him. Toy, in his seminal book, noted that ‘this writer has been struck with the dearth of reliable litetature on the forts of India.’

The English East India Company's Coromandel trade provided a spectacle of steady, if unspectacular, growth from its first inauguration early in the seventeenth century. It was not subject to the violent ups and downs, or the extremes of great success and utter failure that characterized the Company's trade in some other regions of India and Southeast Asia. An expanding trade on this coast was matched by an expanding presence. By the end of the century it was well-founded in two substantial Forts (St George and St David) and a number of residencies in important ports of outlet from Vizagapatnam in the north to Cuddalore in the south. By investment and enterprise, by diplomacy and force, English interests and influence on the coast grew and their settlements became nodal points of Indo-British exchange and interaction. The timely demonstration of controlled power, both when faced with threats from the ‘country’ powers of the hinterland and from European rivals on the seafront, helped in the growth of these settlements beyond mere centres of trade. Providing, as they did, not merely trade and investment, but also security of person and property, they were naturally an attraction to many groups in Indian society in the hinterland.

In the summer of 1920, when the Khilāfat movement (1918–24) was at its height, thousands of British Indian Muslims, under severe emotional stress, began to emigrate to the neighbouring Muslim country of Afghanistan. Believing that British India was no longer safe for Islam they had sought refuge in the hijrat or voluntary withdrawal as the only course left open to them.

To debate about patterns of economic and social mobility within peasant societies is hardly a new game. In particular, our modern discussions are the heirs of a Russian heritage, inevitably mirroring, in some aspect, the great arguments about agrarian change which raged there between the late nineteenth century and collectivization. Two elements ensured for the Russian literature a special cogency and the potential for widespread application. Firstly, the mass of zemstvo statistics provided a more reliable empirical base to theoretical discussions than in any other equivalent society. Secondly, the debate over the peasantry was at the very forefront of the economic and political struggle over Russia's future. Russia between 1890 and 1930 was a society uniquely torn between the advanced and the less developed worlds, bouts of extensive, feverishly quick industrial growth coexisting with an agriculture where Malthusian crisis seemed inexorably to be gathering. The economic performance of the peasantry, three-quarters of the population, clearly provided the key to Russia's developmental fate. In addition, understanding agrarian society was crucial to the political battle for the country. If a large and powerful rich peasant class existed or, as Stolypin hoped, could be created, then the countryside's loyalty could be secured for a conservative régime. Alternatively, Lenin's interpretation of an impoverished, embittered majority within the peasantry seemed to promise a much sounder basis for political revolution than the support of the tiny Russian industrial proletariat. This immediate, practical importance of the Russian peasant debate sharpened the cut and thrust of the arguments.

The rural history of modern India has been and is being written for the most part within the terms of that dictum of Louis Dumont, that ‘a certain hierarchy of ideas, things and people, is indispensable to social life’. Even the scholar who has most recently questioned the distributions of power between sections of the community in North India, arguing for inter-dependence of landlords, peasantry and traders, has still emphasized village controllers, and ‘momentum towards social differentiation’, ‘to produce groups of rich peasants, or rather to continue their existence’. The identity of such rich peasants remains obscure or at least specific to the region being studied; but obviously it would be very useful to have similar generalizations about social stratification in the study of modern Bihar. Hitherto the foundation at least of political histories there has been caste or caste groups, yet economic hierarchy, that related but more enigmatic pecking-order, is surely equally important. In this paper I seek a basis for making such generalizations. Grave difficulties stand in the way. My conclusion throws doubt on the applicability to Bihar of the idea of stable hierarchies, and suggests an alternative approach.

Sun Yat-sen arrived in Shanghai in August 1922 after suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of his former ally, Ch'en Chiung-ming. In the next five months, he negotiated with Russian and Chinese Communists for their collaboration with the Kuomintang. His effort was fruitful, On January 26, 1923, he issued a joint manifesto with the Soviet emissary, Adolf Joffe, who assured the Chinese revolutionary leader—in the name of the ‘Russian people’—of their ‘warmest sympathy for China’ and their ‘willingness to lend support.’.