Ravi A Palat is a professor of sociology at Binghamton University, the State University of New York at Binghamton and had previously taught Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and sociology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand; author of Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim (Routledge, 2004); and The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250-1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015).