Most writers on the Sino-foreign crisis of 1900 have agreed that it marked the end of an era. This perspective has developed out of their focus on north China. Pro-Boxer bureaucrats there were—in most cases—unrealistic reactionaries whose simplistic approach to Sino-foreign relations was terminated by the Allied intervention. Their removal reflected the end of Chinese reaction and of the Confucian state and society.

In Thai studies to date there has been little attempt to discuss the changes that took place during the nineteenth century in terms of what Western historiography would call intellectual history. The reasons for the scant attention paid to this subject are various, having as much to do with the infancy of the field of Thai studies as with the lack of speculative literature (in Siamese) that would attract the curiosity of intellectual historians. For example, we hardly know what books—especially what Western books—were read by the nineteenth-century Siamese elite, let alone how such books shaped its outlook and its perceptions of change. Because Siam has been a predominantly Buddhist state, it might be advisable to begin with Buddhist materials—in particular, with Buddhist cosmography and the Siamese reassessment of it that has taken place since the encounter with the West in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The decline of the Mughal empire is usually considered to begin late in the reign of the emperor Aurangzib (1658–1707). The favorite explanations consist of circles, or even spirals, usually vicious in nature. One important interpretation sees the decline as originating from an increased taxation burden on the peasantry, who revolted in several areas, ultimately with such success that the empire was weakened. More money was needed to crush more revolts, so there was more oppressive taxation and so more revolts. This is less than convincing, for peasant revolts—whether or not led by zamindars locally important land-holders)—were more or less a constant in Mughal India. They were particularly prevalent in Gujarat and Bengal, but Hindustan was far from exempt. What we really need here is an attempt at a quantitative assessment of the number of revolts, and of participants in them, during the whole seventeenth century.

In recent years, historians associated with the school of Indo-Muslim history at Aligarh Muslim University have developed a persuasive, now widely accepted, view of imperial decline. Satish Chandra and M. Athar Ali have argued that a primary cause of the collapse of the Mughal empire in the early eighteenth century was the rise of intense factionalism among the Mughal nobility. Conflict within this imperial elite (i.e., the body of amirs or mansabdars holding ranks of 1000 zat or above) resulted from a rapid rise to nearly double the number of nobles during the latter portion of the reign of the Emperor Aurangzeb (1658–1707). This growth in the number of nobles was not matched by a corresponding increase in the resources available to pay them and their followers. Consequently, the system of alienation of the land-tax proceeds for salary payments (the jagir system) broke down simply because not enough lands could be found to meet a sharply enhanced demand.

At first sight, the last fifteen years has been the most creative—as certainly it has been the most productive—period in the history of the study of why the Mughal empire in India declined. The succession of magisterial publications from the Department of History at the University of Aligarh—Satish Chandra's Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court 1707–1740 (1959), Irfan Habib's The Agrarian System of the Mughal.Empire (1556–1707) (1963), M. Athar Ali's The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), and Noman Ahmad Siddiqi's Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals (1700–1730) (1970)—have, taken together, offered formulae for the understanding of the growing weakness of the empire from the later seventeenth century almost Newtonian in their force and simplicity.