ABSTRACT
From colonial rule to decentralization, agents of commerce, empire and now Development have sought to frame and open up peripheral territories for commercial and moral enterprise, property and rent seeking. Creating financial, physical and institutionally secure territories of commerce meant overwriting existing territorial boundaries: deterritorializing and opening up the old, then reterritorializing in new frames and alignments. This not just in the beginning, where tribal and other territories were reinscribed into trading relationships and empire, but throughout Development history, up to and including the inclusive and institutionalist neoliberal governing arrangements we will consider in Chapters 3 and 4. But the territories and economies they sought to open up and secure were never the smooth spaces or repositories of exploitable resources imagined on the map: and nor did existing political and economic territorializations simply disappear because a gunship or a loan conditionality had arrived on the local political and economic horizon. Rather, hybrid local accommodations would be reached. Whether this was achieved by direct or more Liberal indirect rule, reinvented tradition, integrated area development programmes, or tough loan conditionalities, the places they colonized and developed were only ever partially transformed into local versions of European kingdoms, developmental states or open economy free trading nations.
