Jagged Landscapes: Conceptualizing Borders and Boundaries in the History of Human Societies

Abstract

The present paper discusses ways in which thinking about this paradoxical nature of boundaries might be broadened so that familiar, contemporary, and ultimately very Western notions of what a border actually “is” might be probed and challenged. Borders have histories just as peoples do, and the history of Western borders is only one category among many in global and historical scope. The first part of the paper will focus on conceptual approaches that scholars have taken in examining borders as a rubric of social scientific study. The second part of the paper turns to some of the newer methodologies for this inquiry, as a range of specialists have utilized varying tool kits to hone their analyses of these liminal spaces. The third portion of the essay will look at some regional variations of borders, and how these “lines in space” have appeared in different guises in various global landscapes, and at varying points in the historical continuum. Early Modern Europe, Ottoman Turkey, pre-modern China, and the early Americas are all referenced here. Finally, the last quarter of the paper will pay particular attention to the morphogenesis of Southeast Asian borders, as these delineations came into being only over the last several centuries.

Notes

1 The best description of how borders, boundaries, and frontiers differ is given in Prescott 1987. In shorthand, borders and boundaries imply a micron-thin absolute demarcation between two different political polities. A frontier is more amorphous; it implies a more vague space wherein contacts, trade, identity and passage are all negotiated between different parties.

2 On geographic approaches, see Cowen 2010.

3 For a more contemporary analog, see Smart and Smart 2008.

4 See Aker et al. 2010. Akers and her co-authors asked the following question: do national borders and ethnicity contribute to market segmentation between and within countries? Their paper uses hard-to-source data on a spectrum of narrowly-defined goods to gauge the extent to which a national border impedes trade between developing countries, in this case between Niger and Nigeria. They found significant price changes at the national borders, but one that is lower in magnitude than that found between many industrialized countries. The authors investigated the role of ethnicity in both mitigating and exacerbating the effect of borders on prices. They found that a common ethnicity was linked to lower price dispersion across countries, yet ethnic diversity also created an internal border of sorts within Niger. The main gear behind the internal border effect appears to have been related to the role of ethnicity in facilitating access to credit in rural markets.

5 Burton Watson (1984).

6 See Clint Eastwood's Oscar-nominated “Unforgiven” a few years ago, for example, or the re-make this year of “True Grit.”

7 This study is Scott 2009; the idea was first articulated by van Schendel 2002.

8 See the outline of some of these possibilities presented in a condensed World Bank Report of this year, McLinden et al. 2011.