Scott opens with three complaints: a Qing surveyor beaten by the mountains of Guizhou, a British officer unable to pursue rebels into the Burmese hills, a missionary despairing of Appalachian heterodoxy. Each comes from someone trying to push order into country that would not accept it, and the relation between such projects and the zones that slip them is his subject. In mainland Southeast Asia he locates it in the region's deepest division, hill against valley, upstream against downstream.

Early states, on his account, were creatures of arable plains, built on sedentary grain farming and largely unfree labour, and the surrounding highlands were fiscally worthless to them: foraging, shifting cultivation, herding and fishing are hard to count and harder to appropriate. That periphery was also a standing temptation, a working alternative to life under a state, and those who fled into it were escaping the state itself. Scott treats the encounter as a global one.