The focus of this volume is on political discourse about the pattern and desirability of economic development, and how/why historical interpretations of social phenomena connected to this systemic process alter. It is a trajectory pursued here with reference to the materialism of Marxism, via the mid-nineteenth century ideas about race, through the development decade, the ‘cultural turn’, debates about modes of production and their respective labour regimes, culminating in the role played by immigration before and after the Brexit referendum. Also examined is the trajectory followed by travel writing, and how many of its core assumptions overlap with those made in the social sciences and development studies. The object is to account for the way concepts informing these trajectories do or do not alter.