As stated above the author begins this discussion first by looking at acts of terror and the "space of death" created there. His case of terror is that of the rubber trade in the Putumayo river area of Colombia of the late 19th and early 20th century. Much of these acts of terror stemmed from British rubber barons of the time trying to impose a capitalist mode of production on an indigenous, "wild", population still living under an economy based upon a gift exchange system. In the eyes of the British, who violently pressured the natives to extract rubber from the rubber trees of the area, the Indians "would not work appropriately". The barons' reaction to indigenous resistance was to carry out horrific acts of terror on the minds and bodies of the local population, which Taussig thoroughly documents through providing firsthand accounts from the time. Within the "space of death" created in the Putumayo area came also the death of communal memory and objectivity. Terror resulted in a, "society shrouded in an order so orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that had preceded it—a death-space in the land of the living where torture's certain uncertainty fed the great machinery of the arbitrariness of power" (4).