This chapter charts links between the market forces of the British world-system and powerful processes of semi-peripheral development, dependency and depredation in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), “Destiny and a Blue Cloak” (1874) and his later short story “The Grave by the Handpost” (1897). Across the tales, Britain’s efforts to tighten its influence and control over the Indian subcontinent in the long nineteenth century culminate in profound inequalities of movement and access to people, capital and commodities. The metropolitan tragedies at the heart of the narratives highlight a dynamic of unequal class participation in the colonial project. Hardy’s texts additionally critique the alienating effects of new imperial recruitment strategies and new labouring conditions within the Indian periphery. A wealth of strategies, including uses of social satire, creative transpositions and forms of emasculation, in addition to the presence of anti-jingoistic sentiment, are studied for the way in which they confront Britain’s capitalist ambitions in India and destabilise middle-class ideologies of imperial meritocracy. The chapter also includes comparative notes on uneven conceptions of the role of the working class in relation to imperial wars in Hardy’s war literature and in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Drums of the Fore and Aft” (1889).