Borderlands and bordered lands: historical approaches to border studies 1

C. Patterson Giersch

Chapter 7 in Border Studies, 2025, pp 125-148 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: For many historians, the study of borders evokes the prominent field of borderlands history, which boasts a rich literature dating back at least a century. Often identified as originating in the study of North America, borderlands scholarship and its close relative, frontier history, have long been deployed to understand regions around the globe. This chapter traces how the field of borderlands history has been broadly concerned with examining zones of contact, whether at the intersections of modern nations or other political formations such as empires, where both states and inhabitants engaged in processes of creating various types of boundaries (i.e. geographic, political, demographic, cultural, and economic) as well as forming new transboundary solidarities and alliances. It reviews how borderlands scholarship increasingly centers communities and states that are marginalized by national histories, a trend originating in Americanists’ new Indian history, inner Asianists’ work on steppe state building, and, more recently, a critical engagement with the spatial turn. It also considers how borderlands historians have engaged with work on technologies of knowledge (surveys, mapping, and censuses) to reveal how such technologies were often developed to constitute the categories and limits of imperial and national populations and territory. It concludes with a focus on the extension of the field into the study of littoral and oceanic regions, which has brought scholars using borderlands history concepts into conversation with the extensive literature on sea and ocean basins.

Keywords: Borderlands; Border regions; Frontiers; Zones of contact; Transboundary solidarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781800375383
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