As a recent comparative history of a very different topic nicely demonstrates, points of crisis tend to prompt a re-negotiation of the terms of engagement between the state and societal actors.1 Such was the case in the Senegambia in the decades after 1970 when the crisis was situated within an unhappy conjuncture between the great Sahelian drought of 1968–73 and the OPEC oil price hikes of 1973–4. Declining global prices for agricultural exports, including groundnuts, further compounded an already dire economic picture during the 1980s. The initial response of government was to attempt a rescaling of state institutions as well as a respacing of economic activity in a manner that was intended to draw the geographical margins deeper into state planning objectives. Given that the starting points in Senegal and the Gambia were so different, and given the disparities of size, it is not surprising that the responses varied.