The aim of this detailed study by Michael Roberts is to document the ‘rise of the Karavas’ and to reconstruct the network of historical and social factors which will explain this. It examines how the Karava caste produced a significant proportion of the Sinhalese elite and the Sinhalese capitalist class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also attempts to place this discussion in the context of a ‘caste structure’ and the social theory of caste structure in South Asia. The book can therefore be viewed as a brilliant analysis of the rise of the Karava under British colonial rule.