If we look back at world history in the past five hundred years, it is evident that Indian ideas, peoples, and goods helped drive world connections. From the quest to discover the Indies that drove Iberian rulers to fund costly expeditions that ultimately connected the Old World with the Americas to Gandhi’s creed of non-violence that created transnational resistance movements, India has been crucial to world history. In what ways have the movement of goods, people, and ideas from India served to connect the world? Conversely, how has India’s global history shaped the many boundaries and inequalities that have divided the world despite—and at times because of—the transnational connections often lumped together under the aegis of globalization? Through its emphasis on both linkages and boundaries, India in the World examines the range of connections between India and the world in a truly global perspective.

How does empire operate in frontiers and borderlands during times of conflict? Empire on Edge reveals how British officials attempted, during the second half of the nineteenth century, to understand and impose order on northern Belize, an area that was both a frontier of colonial power and the locus of a disputed border with Mexico. Their efforts were complicated by the local ramifications of Yucatan's Caste War (1847-1901), a long-lasting, violent struggle between segments of the indigenous Maya in southeast Mexico and the Mexican state. The book also illuminates how people who were subject to these efforts, especially the Hispanic and various Maya groups, sought to thwart them by building alliances across seemingly firm lines of racial and ethnic division. Along the way, important questions are raised about the dissonance between colonial and imperial projects, the nature of frontiers and borderlands, and the local effects of disputes between bordering countries.

Andres Canche became the cacique, or indigenous leader, of Cenotillo, Yucatan, in January 1834. By his retirement in 1864, he had become an expert politician, balancing powerful local alliances with his community's interests as early national Yucatan underwent major political and social shifts. In Maya Caciques in Early National Yucatan, Rajeshwari Dutt uses Canche's story as a compelling microhistory to open a new perspective on the role of the cacique in post-independence Yucatan. In most of the literature on Yucatan, caciques are seen as remnants of Spanish colonial rule, intermediaries whose importance declined over the early national period. Dutt instead shows that at the individual level, caciques became more politicized and, in some cases, gained power. Rather than focusing on the rebellion and violence that inform most scholarship on post-independence Yucatan, Dutt traces the more quotidian ways in which figures like Canche held onto power. In the process, she presents an alternative perspective on a tumultuous period in Yucatan's history, a view that emphasizes negotiation and alliance-making at the local level. At the same time, Dutt's exploration of the caciques' life stories reveals a larger narrative about the emergence, evolution, and normalization of particular forms of national political conduct in the decades following independence. Over time, caciques fashioned a new political repertoire, forming strategic local alliances with villagers, priests, Spanish and Creole officials, and other caciques. As state policies made political participation increasingly difficult, Maya caciques turned clientelism, or the use of patronage relationships, into the new modus operandi of local politics. Dutt's engaging exploration of the life and career of Andres Canche, and of his fellow Maya caciques, illuminates the realities of politics in Yucatan, revealing that seemingly ordinary political relationships were carefully negotiated by indigenous leaders. Theirs is a story not of failure and decline, but of survival and empowerment.