Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India

This set of historical essays challenges many cherished assumptions about the century between the Mughal empire and the British colonial period. Based mainly on archival material in old Marathi, a language inaccessible to most scholars, Stewart Gordon examines the caste system in eighteenth-century India by reconsidering castes as open groups defining themselves through processes of power and military service, not as closed groups reinforced by marriage and ideas of ritual purity.