Areas of great but diverse abundance such as wetlands, which offer dozens of subsistence options to a mobile population, because of their very illegibility and fugitive diversity, are not zones of successful state making. The logic of assessable and accessible crops and people applies as well to smaller-scale efforts at control and legibility one finds in the Spanish redduciones in the New World, many missionary settlements, and that paragon of legibility, the monocrop plantation with the workforce in the barracks.
