Chapter 3 argues that the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon started with the successful exploration activities by Texaco between the 1960s and 1980s. Starting from the assumption that oil as a resource does not simply exist out there awaiting its extraction but is the result of a process of social construction, the chapter explores how discourses, policies, technologies, and material infrastructures intersected to transform the Amazon into a “resource environment.” This involved a process of making sense of, systematizing, and appropriating nature – both physically and mentally. The combination of exploration technologies with geophysical knowledge and indigenous guides enabled Texaco to locate oil reserves in its concession area. Exploration changed forever how the region was perceived: the Amazon was reduced to the prospect of oil through different processes of abstraction, such as the issuing of concessions. These early confrontations of the oil business with the rainforest also caused temporary and long-term environmental impacts beyond the conceptual metamorphosis of the Amazon.

I use archival and fieldwork-based qualitative data to do process tracing of the causal mechanisms of the crucial pathway case of the Maoists in Chhattisgarh. The northern and southern parts of Chhattisgarh had colonial indirect rule through feudatory princely states, which created weak state capacity and despotic extraction of land revenue and natural resources through landlords and feudatory chiefs. This created tribal grievances that persisted in the postcolonial period in the 1950s-80s through path dependence of these mechanisms, which were mobilized by the People’s War Group (PWG) Maoists, leading to high levels of Maoist rebel control by the 1990s. In contrast the central districts of Raipur and Bilaspur had been under British direct rule and had relatively higher levels of development and less exploitation of forest and natural resources of tribals, and so the Maoists did not succeed there. I describe the history of the PWG Maoists and how they contributed to the welfare of the tribals and opposed natural/forest resource exploitation, which highlights the role of rebel agency. Finally, I develop a novel constituency-level dataset to test the theory and show that former princely state constituencies had more Maoist control.