Transitions: Methods, Theory, Politics focuses on the political discourse about both the pattern and the desirability of economic development, and how/why historical interpretations of social phenomena connected to this systemic process can alter. It is a trajectory pursued here with reference to the materialism of Marxism, via 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.

Brass also turns his attention to trajectory followed by travel writing, unearthing the way that 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.