The dominant interpretation of warfare in the Indian subcontinent before the establishment of British rule is that it was comprised of unorganised melees by forces of undisciplined militia. This stemmed from the fact that pre-British Indian states were weak polities with divisible sovereignty; they were – to use the terminology of Burton Stein – segmentary states, lacking any concept of frontiers and standing armies. The divisive caste system of India further debilitated the pre-British indigenous states and armies. The argument goes that the rise of British power in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in a sea change in warfare. The British introduced a bureaucratic state with standing armies capable of waging decisive battles and conclusive sieges in India. This interpretation dates back to two nineteenth-century British scholars of colonial India. They argued that Indians were incapable of constructing stable states and structured armies due to their racial failings. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians may have substituted a racial analysis for a cultural one, but otherwise they argue along more or less the same lines, that the limited scale of organised inter-state violence reflected the constraints upon the states of pre-British India.