Like most ethnographies, this book is primarily a descriptive account interspersed with theoretical insights. In my concluding chapter I draw together and expand upon the more general themes.

The political economy of pre-British Thanjāvūr seems to me to have approximated Marx's model of the Asiatic mode of production, and Darcy Ribeiro's of the Theocratic Irrigation State. This type of state was perhaps the earliest to emerge in the world; variants of it may have existed in the pristine states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, northwest India, north China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Certainly it preceded such other types as the “privatistic” slave states exemplified by ancient Greece and Rome (Marx's Ancient Society), or the feudal systems that emerged in post-Roman Europe, Japan, and certain other regions, including (I would argue) Kēraḷa.

As Marx recognized, states of the Asiatic mode remained closer to primitive, prestate societies than did the “privatistic” archaic states, in that land was owned jointly by the monarch and the kinship-based village commune, rather than by individual households or members of the noble or peasant classes.

At the same time, I would argue that states of the so-called Asiatic mode did not constitute a general evolutionary stage between prestate society and Ancient or Feudal societies in the sense of representing a particular stage in the development of the productive forces and of energy appropriation that was necessarily surpassed in the Ancient or the Feudal state.