This book has sought to trace the long-term and fluctuating development of community in the arid southern fringe of Panjab from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. At the core of its analysis is the household, which this study has followed anthropologists and historians from the subcontinent and beyond in studying not simply as an expression of a self-contained ‘culture’, but rather as a vehicle for subsistence in a precarious environment. In the context of late-Mughal southern Panjab, it identified two kinds of extended household or lineage as politically key. The first of these was that of the ra‘iyat, the ordinary husbandman who earned a living through a combination of agropastoralism and raiding–soldiering. The second was that of the ra’is, the chieftain, patron, and provider, who in the eighteenth-century context was often just at a generation's remove from his humble ra‘iyati roots. It was in large part through these ra‘iyati and riyasati lineages that rural folk in southern Panjab provided for themselves, by forging relations with peers, subordinates, and patrons. It is this ensemble of relations and their material context that the first three chapters in particular sought to bring into relief.

The eighteenth century in Panjab as a whole was a time of intense rural warfare. Historians of the Mughal Empire have shown that this protracted period of conflict was the result of two opposing trends: an initial economic upswing that brought prosperity and the chance for socio-economic improvement deep into the hinterland, followed by a contraction that set in by roughly the 1720s.