The goal of this memoir is to provide the foundations for the locally analytic representation theory that is required in three of the author's other papers on this topic. In the course of writing those papers the author found it useful to adopt a particular point of view on locally analytic representation theory: namely, regarding a locally analytic representation as being the inductive limit of its subspaces of analytic vectors (of various ``radii of analyticity'').

The author uses the analysis of these subspaces as one of the basic tools in his study of such representations. Thus in this memoir he presents a development of locally analytic representation theory built around this point of view.

The author has made a deliberate effort to keep the exposition reasonably self-contained and hopes that this will be of some benefit to the reader.