Scott starts from a puzzle about states and people who move — pastoralists, foragers, vagrants, runaways — and arrives at something larger: the state's need to make its subjects legible. Permanent surnames, standardized measures, cadastral surveys, freehold tenure, uniform legal language, planned cities and scientific forestry all appear as devices for converting local complexity into a grid that can be read, taxed and conscripted from a center. Such abridgments do not merely describe; joined to power, they remake what they claim to record.

He then asks why so many well-meant schemes to improve human life ended in catastrophe. Four things together, he argues, are required: administrative simplification; a high-modernist faith that borrows the prestige of science and mistakes geometric regularity for rational order; an authoritarian state prepared to impose it; and a civil society too battered to object. Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward and compulsory villagization supply his cases.