How did two of the world’s most populous countries emerge from a shared colonial legacy with radically divergent and historically enduring political regimes? Investigating that question has been my professional preoccupation for the last decade. That I have finally crafted an answer in the form of this book is a testament to the extraordinary support of a great many individuals and institutions. As such, I would be remiss not to acknowledge some of the hands that have steadied my progress and encouraged my spirits along the gratifying path to the book’s completion. The earliest seed of this project formed over a decade ago when I spent six months working in Dhaka for a microfinance organization. At the time, I was struck by the considerable political differences between Bangladesh and India, despite their common colonial legacy. The idea of systematically exploring the origins of these differences germinated during my enrollment in Atul Kohli’s graduate course the Comparative Political Economy of Development, at Princeton. This engaging and provocative course, which asked ambitious questions about the origins of worldwide patterns of economic development, charted the kind of bold intellectual terrain that inspired my enrollment in a political science doctoral program and that directly led to the writing of this book.