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A marked feature of the business and industrial élites of post-colonial India and Indonesia is the dominance within them of minority communities. An Indian government commission in 1965 reported that, of the top 75 business houses which controlled almost half of the non-governmental, non-banking assets in the country, Marwari houses occupied the apex with control of Rs 7.5 billion in assets, followed by the Parsis with Rs 4.7 billion and Gujaratis with Rs 3.8 billion. By 1980 the Parsi Tata group represented the largest industrial house in India, followed by the Marwari Birlas. In Indonesia it is the Chinese who overwhelmingly comprise the business and industrial ĺite. Despite problems with quantifiable data, it has been assessed that the Chinese own, at the very least, 70–75% of Indonesia's private domestic capital and that Chinese business conglomerates such as the Liem and Astra groups dominate medium and large-scale corporate capital.

The revivalist movements which developed in so many Muslim communities at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries are well known to students of Islamic history. The Fulanijihādof Usuman dan Fodio, the Sanūsīyah movement in Libya, the rise of the Wahhābīs in Arabia, the reforms instituted among the Volga Tatars, the Mujāhidīn movement in Northern India and the Fara'idis of Bengal have all been the subject of study to a greater or lesser extent. Scholars have pointed out that movements which aimed initially at internal reform in a particular Muslim community often developed the added dimension of attack on what was conceived as an external, generally foreign, threat to that community, this being most clearly the case with the Wahhābīs and the Mujāhidīn. A contemporary movement which has features in common with all those mentioned above, that of the Padisr among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, has on the contrary received scant scholarly attention. This is all the more surprising since a European state—the Kingdom of the Netherlands—became involved in a war with the Minangkabau while the Padri movement was still in its full vigour; but although Dutch records and memoirs deal more than amply with this war, they have remained ignored for what they can tell us about the Padris themselves. This is not to deny that scholars who have attempted a brief characterization of the Padri movement have recognized that its complexity goes beyond the mere epithet 'Islamic revivalism', and the more perceptive have tried to link it to certain changes taking place within Minangkabau society, depicting the movement as 'a social revolution', 'a coup d'étai'or, by implication, as a revolt of the intellectuals. In the later stages of the movement, after European intervention had gathered momentum, a French scholar has characterized the war fought by the Padris as a 'war of independence'.

From the Middle Ages each of the great merchant castes and communities of Gujarat possessed its own guild (Mahajan) to regulate trade, and a Panchayat to regulate caste matters. The migration of members of these castes to the British city of Bombay in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused considerable disruption in the traditional methods of regulating caste affairs. In the Mofussil control over almost every aspect of mundane life had been exercised by the leading shets of the caste. In Bombay, however, the precedence of certain Mofussil villages and Mofussil families was no longer unequivocally recognized. Western-educated caste members began to demand in all areas of life 'the inauguration of a new era, showing that opinion had taken the precedence of mere hereditary authority'. Even to those without Western education the proximity of the British law courts gave confidence in an appeal against traditional obedience. The fear of the interference of the courts on behalf of an excommunicated man limited the sanctions available to the caste shets to enforce their authority. All these factors circumscribed the power the caste heads could exercise through their traditional Panchayats, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it seemed that the cohesiveness of many castes and communities was breaking down. But there was another side to the coin. While the bonds of caste discipline and authority were being loosened, awareness of communal identity was being heightened by the competitiveness of urban life. Castes and communities became aware of the need to reorganize themselves in order to present a united front on questions affecting the community, and of the need to put caste funds to the best use to maximize the possibilities of secular achievement for the members of the community.