Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China’s West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests (Stanford University Press, 2020) challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880 – 1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment — a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into powerful networks of control over resources and people.