Returning to the Jhaveri family, Chapter 5 explores the climax of full-blown antagonism between key financial agents and sources of Mughal authority in what I am calling a phase of expedient extortion. I focus on the life and activities of Khushalchand (1680–1748), a third generation Jhaveri brought into the whirlwind of financing gubernatorial rivalries to the point of being violently extorted and forced into exile. In contrast to his forefathers, whose personal security was safeguarded and whose loans were repaid, Khushalchand experienced grotesque violence at the hands of Mughal officials. As a reaction and response, he sought protection by gambling capital on political futures. Given that multiple groups were vying for power as the Mughal state atrophied, Khushalchand reoriented his business towards raising finance for political elites, and brokered deals between armed groups who aspired control of Ahmedabad and its environs. In the process, he faced both criticism and praise from local residents and members of the business fraternity.

Populism is a political strategy that relies on the use of a personalistic political organization and mass communication to mobilize support in the quest for power; it will be most successful when it is more cost-effective than the alternatives of programmatic political party building or the distribution of patronage. The costs involved in this trade-off come in two forms: direct costs and indirect (or transaction) costs. In politics, very often transaction costs – search, bargaining, and enforcement costs – are the higher ones. Populists lower the costs of mobilizing support by communicating directly with voters instead of working through intermediaries such as party professionals or political brokers. The populist strategy will be most effective when two conditions are met. First, potential voters or supporters must be available for direct mobilization. This means that they must be relatively free of existing party attachments. Second, the opposition should be divided. Most populists win with the backing of a mere plurality rather than a majority. The more the opposition is split between multiple contenders, the more economically viable is the populist strategy.

This chapter presents the book’s policy arenas framework which seeks to account for the direction and magnitude of immigration reform. Whether policy reform will liberalize or restrict immigration will depend on policy makers’ insulation from four actors with distinct sets of preferences: domestically, the general public and interest groups; internationally, immigrant sending states and immigrant receiving states. Whereas insulation from popular pressure and from diplomatic pressure by receiving states will allow for policy liberalization, insulation from interest groups and sending states will move policy in the direction of immigration restriction. Which of these pressures policy makers are exposed to will vary across policy arenas. The chapter then turns its attention to the policy path itself, distinguishing between constitutional rules and political strategy. Constitutional rules define the arenas through which a policy proposal must minimally pass. Oftentimes informed by policy learning, political strategy can account for variation in policy paths over time in a given constitutional context. The chapter then theorizes the magnitude of policy change by distinguishing between incremental and paradigmatic immigration reform. The success of paradigmatic immigration reform will depend upon a highly restrictive set of conditions, most importantly, the absence of reform opponents with veto power.