It has been established that the pattern of frontier expansion is not fortuitous, but proceeds in response to larger forces within the national economy. In particular political intervention and violence are seen to promote a specific process of accumulation, which contributes to national economic growth. The relationship between frontier and national economy is interpreted, in purely economic terms, as achieving a transfer of value from one to the other. But the moving frontier does more than merely feed the growth of the national economy through primitive accumulation. Frontier expansion extends the boundaries of this economy, and by its advance creates an economic, from a natural, environment. The frontier experience, the political intervention and the violence, is not merely the effect of specific production and exchange relations, but participates in a complex of such relations in the countryside, and can impose these relations. Therefore, in addition to a particular interpretation of the relationship of the frontier to the national economy, there exists a clear need for a broad conceptual scheme which can successfully locate the place of the frontier in the formation of the national economy – a global theory of frontier expansion.

By definition the frontier exists on the periphery of the economy, and the scheme of ‘centre–periphery’ relations seems a logical choice for the location of the frontier. But such a scheme is purely descriptive, and in practice is given very different conceptual contents (Balan 1974).