ABSTRACT
Comparing, contrasting and moving between political science, international relations, economics, cultural studies and geography, this chapter provides a case study of how circles of 'cultural', 'economic' and 'political' powers intersect and (re)produce each other and how the state emerges out of the trace marked by these interplays. Together with a few anthropologists and geographers, employees of the British Foreign and Colonial Office developed elaborate notions of racial difference, masculine heroism and colonial administration, to be applied in Africa and Asia with a mixture of 'civilizing mission' and brute force. The significance of the abstract models of customs unions and trade blocs that have been formulated, debated and refined by economists arises from the way that economics has come to occupy a privileged position as a source of policy. The ceding of functions in one domain was expected to create demands and pressures for a similar assignment of others.
