Anthropology, Trouillot proposes, was born inside the very project it studies. He traces the making of the West to Renaissance Europe, where a geography of imagination opened a Savage slot for the inherently Other, and he pairs that with a geography of management: colonisation, forced labour, trade and the state system that carried the imagination on the ground. Six linked essays follow the pairing forward. Global flows of people, crops, goods, religions and ideas began in the sixteenth century, so the speed and direction of today's flows can only be measured against five centuries of precedent. He reads state power as increasingly detached from national government, questions how the culture concept works in North American anthropology and how it became entangled with race, and treats globalisation talk as prone to two illusions, euphoria and nostalgia. Evidence comes from Caribbean history, the discipline's own institutional record, and close attention to vocabulary inherited from the nineteenth century.