Scott opens with three complaints from frustrated officials: Qing surveyors defeated by the mountains of Guizhou, British soldiers unable to pursue rebels into the Burmese hill jungle, and a missionary despairing of the creek-cut valleys of Appalachia. Each speaks for a project of rule that styled itself as order and enlightenment, and each was baffled by terrain and by people who would not hold still.

From that irritation he builds an argument about the long quarrel between lowland states and the peoples above them. Living without a state, he points out, has been the ordinary human condition; the grain-growing kingdoms of Southeast Asia were late, small and thinly populated, and a land-rich frontier meant that subjects who were pressed too hard could simply go. Flight set a practical limit on rulers, and the hills filled accordingly.

Only the modern state has had the means to close that frontier, a final enclosure carried out under the name of development.