Chapter 1 lays out the book’s research strategy. Deploying a post-colonial critique of the terms of the relationship between the African South and the global economy requires questioning law’s double bind – as both enabler and bulwark against domination – and confronting ourselves to the imperial entanglement of scholarship (Steinmetz 2013). Building on Tilly’s trilogy of coercion-extraction-protection (1985), the chapter identifies two sets of variables deployed throughout the book to track the articulation between law, politics and capitalist expansion over time: the ‘double-edged protection’ produced by legal imperialism and the ‘middle power’ used by the British hegemon and competing imperial métropoles to justify colonialism and lessen social disruption and inter-imperial rivalries. Lastly, the chapter explains the book’s methodology. Zooming in and out to track imperial encounters at the scale of localities, institutions and global structures exposes pre-existing conflicts and contradictions that help understand ongoing conflicts and contradictions in late capitalism.