All posts
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Between Arab Conquest and Persian Conversion: The Sasanian Inheritance
X.T.M uses Hugh Kennedy and Ira Lapidus to argue that conquest and conversion were different processes in Iran, rejecting both the viral claim of mass forced conversion and the opposite…
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The Demise of Brown Pundits Is Much Exaggerated
X.T.M says reports of the site’s decline are exaggerated: monthly readers fell from roughly 55-65k to 33k, then recovered to about 53k, with Bangladesh a surprise growth market, and he…
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Empire of Incorporation versus Empire of Extraction
X.T.M distinguishes empires of incorporation, such as the Chinese, Ottoman and Mughal, from commercial empires of extraction such as the French, English and Dutch, citing the contrast between Mughal-era scarcity…
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Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs:
X.T.M argues that elites are reproduced by property, institutions and networks rather than blood, so intermarriage is usually a merger, not a threat, citing English aristocrats and American heiresses, Parsis,…
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Dravidian Progressivism is a Scam
Nachiketa answers X.T.M on Chennai, arguing that the city’s welfare and cleanliness cannot simply be credited to Dravidian progressivism, pointing to Tamil Nadu’s 97 percent caste endogamy rate and describing…
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Venezuela as Pakistan: A Template, Not an Accident
X.T.M argues that Venezuela is being remade into a ‘Pakistan’: a regime form kept unstable, securitised and dependent, but intact enough to sign contracts and serve as leverage, reached through…
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Chennai Is Not an Accident
X.T.M observes that Chennai retains a non-transactional social reflex, with strangers helping unasked, and attributes it to Tamil language, Dravidian suspicion of centralisation, unstaged religious pluralism and weak chain retail,…
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Does India have a “once in a millennium chance”?
Omar Ali argues India has a rare chance to become a developed power because of its capable people, intact cultural strengths and the inherited machinery of the Raj, and that…
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Where are the old commentators
Nachiketa notes that many long-standing commenters have disappeared from the site and suggests the genomics and history enthusiasts left once Razib Khan stopped blogging.
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The evolving understanding of varNa in Indian history
Nachiketa, writing as a self-described informed layperson, traces how varna evolved from the Rigvedic priest and warrior elites through the Vaishya and Shudra categories to the modern understanding shaped under…
