Territoriality, Infrastructure, and Borders

The end of the Cold War gave rise to a renewed sense of geo-historical contingency, and thus to ‘the spatial turn.’ The Soviet Union’s collapse triggered processes of de- and reterritorialization. Borders were redrawn and supranational bonds rebuilt. This re-sensitized scholars to the historical conditionality of geopolitical constellations. Of course, and as the attentive reader will notice, the introduction to Doing Spatial History already elaborated on the significance of the end of the Cold War for ‘the spatial turn.’ It is nonetheless worth reiterating here. So too is the connection between, on the one hand, ‘the spatial turn’ and, on the other, the transformation of communication technologies, digital networks, and infrastructure, as well as the acceleration of global economic transactions. From around 1990, these trends fed into a discourse on the alleged ‘end of the nation-state’ and the rise of a seemingly ‘borderless world.’ As the introduction makes clear, these contentions did not go unchallenged – far from it. The key point here, however, is that the emerging discourse on ‘globalization’ – whatever its inner complexities – made an important contribution to the rising interest in space.⁹

Once within Borders is the title of a major work of synthesis by Harvard historian Charles Maier. It was published in 2016, but its origins lay in the more immediate aftermath of the Cold War, as well as turn-of-the-millennium debates on ‘globalization.’ During this period, Maier carved out what would become the book’s conceptual and analytical framework. The focus lies on territoriality – and territorial transformations – over the past five centuries. Maier delineates an era of ‘modern territoriality,’ a period marked by a near-complete overlap between, on the one hand, the ‘decision space’ of rule, law and governance and, on the other, the ‘identity space’ of principal loyalties and belonging. The final quarter of the twentieth century, Maier argues, has seen the curtain begin to fall on this era of ‘modern territoriality.’ Territoriality has ceased to be a self-evident, ‘taken-for-granted’ category. It is thus ripe for historicization.

Despite the book’s title, however, Maier commences with the idea that ‘once,’ in other, earlier historical settings, human beings had not lived ‘within borders.’ In Europe, this began to change from the seventeenth century, and especially so with the nineteenth-century formation of nation-states. Increasingly, people came to live within the bounded spaces of nation-states. At the end of the book, Maier offers some reflections which seem again to stand in contradiction to the volume’s title. He points to more recent boundary-reinforcing historical developments such as statesmen erecting fences and building walls. This gives him cause to ask whether people might not, after all, ‘still’ be living ‘within borders’ – that is, in national territories that are ‘still guarded, still militant.’¹⁰

Since ‘the spatial turn,’ historians have addressed the subject of territoriality in a more sustained and systematic manner.¹¹ Maier defines territory as ‘space with a border that allows effective control of public and political life.’ In this context, effective control means exclusive control. In modern times, this control has been exerted or facilitated by political decision makers, fortress architects, urban planners, civil engineers, land surveyors, cartographers, and geopolitical pundits. Territory is understood as ‘turf,’ carved out from ‘global space,’ so to speak, in order to establish and exert political authority. Politics, then, operates through claims over the management of space. The history of territory is thus the history of ‘political space.’¹²

Maier’s approach is informed by an engagement with a range of human and political geographers, among them John Agnew and Robert Sack. In an oft-cited article from 1994, Agnew cautioned against what he called ‘the territorial trap,’ i.e. the illusion of timeless territoriality, and the fallacies this entailed. He cast doubt on some of the ‘geographical assumptions’ which, at the time, were widespread in international relations (IR) theory. These included a tendency to view states as ‘fixed units of sovereign space’ and as ‘containers of society,’ unaffected by the passage of time.¹³ From the late 1980s and early 1990s, Agnew had also been instrumental in establishing a new subfield at the intersection of geography and IR. This came to be known as ‘critical geopolitics.’ It set out to dissect the hidden assumptions, motivations, and strategies behind the geographical thinking, framing and making of foreign policy. In other words, ‘critical geopolitics’ aimed to examine the ways in which political actors and thinkers spatialized world politics.¹⁴ This comprised the debunking of ‘naturalistic fallacies,’ such as the notion of supposedly ‘natural borders’ (rivers, mountain ranges etc.) or the assumption of a geopolitical ‘heartland’ and ‘geographical pivot of history’ (as outlined by British geographer Halford Mackinder in 1904).¹⁵ It also entailed a historicization of the various founders and prominent proponents of geopolitics, from the late nineteenth century to the Cold War. Such figures include Rudolf Kjellén, Friedrich Ratzel, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, Carl Schmitt, Isaiah Bowman, and Yves Lacoste.¹⁶

One of Agnew’s primary goals was the re-assertion of a ‘historical-geographical consciousness’ in scholarship on territory and sovereignty.¹⁷ He had a strong ally here in geographer Robert Sack. In 1986, Sack had published a major work on the subject of ‘human territoriality’ as part of the series Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography. Even today, this text remains a key reference point. Human agency and intentionality are central to Sack’s understanding of ‘human territoriality.’ This emerges as a deliberate strategy with potentially important effects. Sack defines it as ‘the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.’ Territories are not simply ‘there.’ To exist, they require ‘constant effort’ in order to establish and maintain them. Less important than what they are, however, is what they do – they exert control over ‘people and things.’¹⁸ The purpose of human territoriality, then, is bound up with the control of behaviour. This can relate to a variety of areas, ranging from the home and the workplace to parishes, neighbourhoods, prisons and enclosures.

Another promising undertaking in this area is to be found in the work of Matthias Middell and his Leipzig-based collaborative research project, which focuses on ‘processes of spatialization under the global condition.’¹⁹ Next to Jürgen Osterhammel, Middell is perhaps foremost among those scholars who emphasise the intimate connection between ‘global history and the spatial turn.’ Indeed, this was the title of a programmatic article from 2010, co-authored by Middell and Katja Naumann. In this article, the authors advance a tripartite conceptual framework. This comprises ‘regimes of territorialization’ (imperial, national, multi-scalar), ‘critical junctures of globalization’ (crises, wars, revolutions), and ‘portals of globalization’ (ports, cities, and other hubs of transcultural ‘glocal’ encounters).²⁰

More recently, this framework has been complemented by concepts of ‘spatial format’ and ‘spatial order.’ The first of these encapsulates long-lasting, wide-spread, and self-conscious formats of spatialization, such as empire, settler colony, nation-state, region, transregional organization, trade zone, and intellectual network. ‘Spatial order,’ meanwhile, relates to a set of interdependent and relationally intertwined spatial formats. These concepts are made tangible through a focus on the perceptions, intentions and spatial practices of concrete historical actors.²¹ Several studies have emerged from the Leipzig-based research centre which apply the various analytical components of ‘spatial formats under the global condition’ to empirical case studies. These include works on Mumbai’s ports (1833-2014), the American West and South in the nineteenth century, and ‘space-making and multiple territorialities’ in the borderlands of nineteenth- and twentieth-century East and Central Africa.²²

This body of scholarship represents a particular approach to the history of territoriality. A very different approach has been pursued by the historical sociologist Chandra Mukerji. Her book Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (1997) is a theoretically engaged, yet granular and finely detailed, contribution to the field. The book is replete with engravings, sketches, plans, and photographs. It convincingly relates territoriality to material culture and the built environment. The central focus lies on Louis XIV’s famous gardens. These emerge as ‘expressions of a new French political territoriality’ that evolved during the seventeenth century. Mukerji shows how the earthworks of Versailles served as tools and laboratories of power. They both reflected and demonstrated transformations in the governance and territoriality of France itself. Mukerji is a ceaseless drawer of lines and connections. She undertakes this partly through analogy, and partly by making causal links. Her connections traverse, on the one hand, Versailles’s walls, moats, and canals, the landscape grading and terraces for surveying the land, and, on other, Sébastien de Vauban’s fortress designs and other features of French military engineering. Territoriality is approached here through the ‘material manipulation of the land.’ As Mukerji emphatically states, the France which emerges from the book is very much ‘a place.’²³

A multifaceted complication of the idea of territory is one of the many benefits of An Aqueous Territory (2016), Ernesto Bassi’s study of the ‘transimperial Greater Caribbean’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book is based on a thorough engagement with spatial theory – names such as Agnew, Lefebvre and Massey all feature. Bassi refuses to follow in the footsteps of nation- and empire-centred historiography. Instead, he charts the routes of sailors criss-crossing political borders and creating their own ‘transimperial’ region of ‘islands, continental coasts, and open waters’ along the way. Such ‘everyday acts of region making’ often eschewed territorial control. The sailors navigated with relative ease between various ports. They came to inhabit and produce ‘a space that was […] simultaneously Spanish, British, and French, as well as Dutch, Danish, Anglo-American, African.’ At the same time, Bassi acknowledges that political borders in the early nineteenth century did increasingly thwart ‘geopolitical imaginations’ of a ‘transimperial’ Caribbean. A striking example here is Colombia’s formation as a self-consciously Andean-Atlantic nation.²⁴

The history of territoriality is intimately linked to the history of infrastructure. Railroads, telegraphs, bridges – these have a decisive impact on time and space.²⁵ It is unsurprising that Chandra Mukerji, with her abiding interest in both materiality and territoriality, has turned to the subject of infrastructure in her more recent work. Her book Impossible Engineering (2009), for example, focuses on the late-seventeenth-century construction of the Canal du Midi, which connected the Atlantic with the Mediterranean.²⁶ Mukerji sees infrastructure as a material form of ‘impersonal rule.’ To be sure, it can lend states a ‘palpable presence.’ And yet it often works ‘below the level of conscious awareness.’ Moreover, rather than necessarily acting as an enabling force for political elites, it may also, over time, restrict their room for manoeuvre – in some cases, quite severely.²⁷

This observation serves to complicate the view of state power as laid out by the classic Seeing Like A State (1998). In this book, political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott makes the case for a more clear-cut link between, on the one hand, the power of ruling elites and, on the other, material constructions. These may include infrastructural projects that emerge from centralized state planning and are rooted in a ‘high modernist’ zeal to ‘improve the human condition.’²⁸

Historian Dirk van Laak, a key figure in this field, has described infrastructures as ‘material links between the past, present and future of a society.’²⁹ They transcend political ruptures and constitute long-term path dependencies. Typically, they are defined as means of supply and disposal (of water, waste and so on), and of transport and communication. In most cases, they are materially tangible. Moreover, they are key components of daily routines. They, therefore, appear timeless and ever-present – a ‘background technology’ that tends to be innocuous, provided that it ‘works.’

Infrastructures provide fixed, material structures that facilitate flows: of resources, goods, and information. Indeed, the title of van Laak’s major work on the subject is: ‘Everything in flux.’³⁰ Infrastructures are a hallmark of modern society, and of the acceleration of modern life. Typically, they are made for ‘anonymous use,’ and for participation in the ‘common good.’ Consequently, they have been seen as an important means of integration. They serve to unlock and connect territories – economically, socially, and culturally. They function as a key strategy in the creation of simultaneity and ‘spatial uniformity,’ exerting a conditioning and disciplining effect on behaviour. For all of these reasons, infrastructures have played a crucial role in processes of nation-building. Clearly, however, access to infrastructure tends to vary along social, ethnic and geographic lines – between, for example, city and countryside. As in other areas of social life, processes of inclusion and exclusion are inextricably linked. Importantly, moreover, the political intent and in-built technological tendency to homogenize space is frequently countered by culturally specific appropriations of infrastructure.³¹

The spatial-historical implications of infrastructural projects have been illuminated by a range of studies that have appeared over the past twenty to thirty years. In Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World (2013), for example, global historian Roland Wenzlhuemer offers a detailed analysis of the expanding submarine telegraph network in the late nineteenth century. He shows the pivotal role of Britain and British India in shaping these networks. To be sure, it is not entirely surprising that London is highlighted as a global communication hub, with considerable regional unevenness of connectivity. Methodologically, however, Wenzlhuemer’s focus on both network structure and network use are highly instructive. So too is his map-, chart-, and cartoon-based combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Moreover, his book is closely informed by spatial theory. Wenzlhuemer is thus able to adeptly distinguish between a variety of relationally conceived spaces (communication space, transport space, telephone cost space, transport cost space). He critically engages with contemporary notions of the ‘annihilation of space through time.’ In place of this concept, Wenzlhuemer suggests that telegraph-driven globalization be framed in terms of a ‘detachment of patterns of human communication from geographic proximity.’ New spaces were produced, and others transformed. Above all, ‘communication space’ condensed along an infrastructural axis between North America’s East Coast, London, Europe, and South Asia.³²

The entanglement of global infrastructures and regional environments is at the heart of Beyond the Big Ditch (2014), Ashley Carse’s interdisciplinary study on the Panama Canal watershed. Carse, a cultural anthropologist, bases his study on detailed archival research, ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, as well as a thorough command of spatial theory. His book demonstrates that the 1914 opening of the famous waterway marked the beginning of an ‘ongoing social and environmental management project.’³³ Certainly, infrastructures are typically created to alleviate some of the inconveniences of daily life. And yet their maintenance can be highly demanding. To paraphrase the late sociologist Susan Leigh Star: ‘One person’s infrastructure is another’s problem.’³⁴

This is amply demonstrated by the case of the Panama Canal. Enormous amounts of fresh water were needed per transit of ship, while the 1970s and 1980s saw rising anxieties about an apparently impending water shortage. This resulted in a burgeoning competition over the surrounding forest between interoceanic transportation and slash-and-burn agriculture. What this actually entailed was a conflict between canal administrators and smallholder farmers (campesino), while both groups were themselves integrated into global infrastructures and territorial politics. Ultimately, canal-related ‘scale‐making projects’ certainly created new connections between oceans. However, they also produced disconnections between people and places.³⁵

Another illuminating example here is provided by Julia Tischler’s Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation (2013), which focuses on the construction of the Kariba Dam in the latter half of the 1950s. The creation of this hydroelectric dam on the border between today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe entailed the eviction and resettlement of 57,000 Gwembe Tonga peasants from their Zambezi riverine villages. As Tischler shows, it also served to ‘cement’ patterns of ‘uneven development’ in racial as well as rural/urban relations. The legacy of this infrastructural project – and its impact – was to endure throughout the postcolonial period.³⁶

Indeed, much scholarship has focused on the relationship between water infrastructure and urban modernity. Cultural geographer Matthew Gandy’s study The Fabric of Space (2014), for example, takes the reader on a journey from nineteenth-century Paris to postcolonial Lagos and contemporary Mumbai.³⁷ Needless to say, infrastructure has also become a subject for social historians. Ravi Ahuja’s Pathways of Empire (2009) and Aparajita Mukhopadhyay’s Imperial Technology and ‘Native’ Agency (2018) are two notable works of spatially informed history writing that focus on infrastructure. These contributions examine roads, canals, and railways in colonial India as ‘materializations of social relations in space,’ which served to foreground questions of access and social transformation.³⁸

Both the history of territoriality and the history of infrastructure are closely related to the history of borders. As mentioned, Charles Maier’s Once within Borders essentially diagnoses a transition from ‘fuzzy’ frontier zones to clear border lines.³⁹ For the reasons outlined above, historical research on borders and borderlands has gathered pace since the end of the Cold War. It has frequently been rooted in ‘the spatial turn.’ To be sure, borders have long been the subject of historical investigation, often focussing on political hotspots such as the Mexico-United States border, the India-Pakistan border, and the borders of Israel. Indeed, the Association for Borderlands Studies, housed by Arizona State University, was founded as early as 1976. Its initial focus lay on the US-Mexican borderlands. Since 1986, this Association has been home to the Journal of Borderlands Studies, the flagship publication in the field. In much the same way, the Centre for Borders Research at Durham, founded in 1989 as International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU), also preceded the end of the Cold War.⁴⁰

Likewise, it is certainly true that the landmark study by Peter Sahlins on the Franco-Spanish border, laconically titled Boundaries (1989), did not originate from the political context of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather, it followed more directly in the wake of the 1980s cultural turn. This was evident from the book’s intensive questioning of the supposed naturalness of geographical categories. Tellingly, ‘Natural Frontiers Revisited’ was the title of an article derived from Sahlins’ book and published in the American Historical Review. In this article, he argued that borders are anything but natural. Sahlins partly drew inspiration from Gaston Zeller’s work on France’s eastern frontier and Lucien Febvre’s famous study of the Rhine (both published in the 1920s and 1930s). Sahlins demonstrated that, in many respects, the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees was only the beginning of a long-term process of border-making. At first, the political border bore little relevance to people living on either side of it, but increasing territorial and infrastructural power rendered this border a reality. What proved decisive was the enactment of the border by local populations on the ground. To be sure, state territory was the product of central governance from the capitals of Paris and Madrid. In crucial ways, however, it was also made at the margins, in the borderlands themselves.⁴¹

Despite the existence of this scholarship, however, it was not until the 1990s that border studies became a booming field.⁴² Since then, a range of centres and research networks have been formed. Notable examples include the Centre for Cross Border Studies at Armagh and Dublin (1999), and the Centre for International Borders Research at Belfast (2000), both founded in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998; the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (1998); the Environment and Governance Research Group at the University of New South Wales, home to the journal Borderlands (2001); the Asian Borderlands Research Network (2008); the Eurasia Unit for Border Research, Japan (2013); and the African Borderlands Research Network (2007).

Over the past twenty years, borders and borderlands have been a prominent component of a ‘spatial turn’ in African studies. This can be seen from volumes such as The Spatial Factor in African History (2005), Respacing Africa (2010), and Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa (2018).⁴³ Paul Nugent, Professor of Comparative African History and founder of the African Borderlands Research Network, has been particularly active here.⁴⁴ His latest book Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa (2019) compares the borderlands of Ghana/Togo and The Gambia/Senegal. It elucidates the ways in which these states were shaped through myriad processes and policies relating to their borders. These included the conversion of pre-colonial ‘frontier zones into colonial borders,’ as well as the regulation of ‘border spaces,’ not least the ‘border flows’ of people and goods.

The key message of Nugent’s book is that margins are central. So too are cross-border ‘realities of everyday connectivity.’⁴⁵ Indeed, Nugent already explored some of these ideas in his earlier study Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier (2002). In this book, Nugent placed much emphasis on the agency of local populations in co-producing a border that both divided and connected them. They did so by harnessing state power (and its limits) to their advantage, and via networks of smuggling that transformed the border zone into a ‘theatre of opportunity.’⁴⁶ More recently, Nugent has turned his attention to the subject of border infrastructures such as seaports and ‘transport corridors.’ These serve to connect urban markets and mining centres in Africa both regionally and globally.⁴⁷

In terms of conceptual and analytical framework, scholars of borders and borderlands can draw on a pool of ideas, both old and new. Annales historian Lucien Febvre, for instance, aptly highlighted the dual function of borders as oscillating between a ‘suturing’ frontier zone (couture) and a ‘severing’ border line (coupure).⁴⁸ As the studies by Sahlins, Nugent and others have shown, the manifestations of a border often hinge on social practices on the ground – the ‘lived border,’ as some historians have styled it.⁴⁹ This view is usually informed by a central insight formulated by sociologist Georg Simmel in 1908. Simmel suggested that ‘the boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially.’⁵⁰ Of varying influence have been typologies of borderlands from ‘infant’ to ‘defunct,’ from ‘alienated’ to ‘integrated,’ and from ‘quiet’ to ‘rebellious.’⁵¹ Philosophical and anthropological conceptualizations of borders have also played a role here.⁵² A widely-cited example comprises Gloria Anzaldúa’s semi-autobiographical reflections on the US-Mexican borderlands. She characterises these as indicative of psychological, linguistic, sexual and gender identity dynamics that are fundamental to ‘border cultures’ more generally.⁵³

Both thematically and geographically, historical research on borders and borderlands has been impressively wide-ranging. Its scope can only be highlighted here in the briefest possible way. Standout works include D. Graham Burnett’s Masters of All They Surveyed (2000). This book was partly inspired by Paul Carter’s ‘spatial history,’ as well as by Greg Dening’s Islands and Beaches (1980). Burnett incisively dissects colonial practices of ‘traverse’ or route surveying, landmark creation, and boundary making in nineteenth-century British Guiana in South America.⁵⁴ Another key study which dovetails nicely with Burnett’s book, and which focuses on the same period, is Thomas Simpson’s theoretically-attuned The Frontier in British India (2021). This work elucidates how frontiers in northwest and northeast India turned out to be fluctuating, uncontrollable, ‘“messy” spaces,’ which served to embody the ‘limits of the colonial state’ in more than one respect.⁵⁵ Tamar Herzog’s Frontiers of Possession (2015), meanwhile, draws on a legal history perspective to show how boundaries between early modern Portugal and Spain were formed on both sides of the Atlantic. This book throws into sharp relief the relationship between, on the one hand, treaty making and border legislation and, on the other, common legal cultures and conflicting local interests. These ranged from settlers to soldiers, who fiercely contested their right to land.⁵⁶

International law and the multiple dimensions of ‘the local’ are also part of Nianshen Song’s Making Borders in Modern East Asia (2018). This book focuses on turn-of-the-century disputes over the China-Korea border. In particular, it explores the Tumen River borderlands as an ‘integrated socioecological unit’ constituted by Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian power rivalries, state-building competition, socio-economic cross-border interactions, and the formation of a Korean diaspora in Northeast China.⁵⁷ Alyssa Park’s Sovereignty Experiments (2019) is complementary to Song’s study. Park analyses processes of territorialization in Northeast Asia from the vantage point of Korean migration, as well as persistent attempts to control it by Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian authorities. This ultimately lead to the creation of the strict border regime that still exists between Russia, China, and North Korea.⁵⁸

Indeed, Asian borderlands have been the subject of much research over the past two decades. This has ranged from work on Qing China’s Yunnan frontier to investigations of smuggling in modern Southeast Asia, and studies on Iranian nation-building.⁵⁹ Needless to say, borderlands in other parts of the world thus far unmentioned in this section have drawn increased scholarly attention as well. Recent work on Central Europe, for instance, has taken in language frontiers in the Habsburg Empire; borders and the movement of goods and people in the Holy Roman Empire; borderland schooling in interwar Europe; and the Cold-War inner German border of the Iron Curtain.⁶⁰

Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness

How can we analytically approach the many ways in which boundaries, across various scales, are both socially produced and themselves agents of identity formation? An answer to this question can be gleaned from the model study on the Finnish-Russian border by political geographer Anssi Paasi.⁶¹ This contribution draws widely on spatial theory. It touches on Lefebvre, Foucault, Giddens, Sack, Agnew, Massey, and Peter Taylor, and deploys spatial theory to great effect in empirical analysis.⁶² The book traces the ‘changing geographies’ of Finland’s eastern border during the twentieth century, with a focal point on critical junctures of the 1940s, the Cold War period, and its aftermath.

In 1917, Finland separated from Russia and gained independence. The eastern border thereupon attained great significance within the state-driven project of Finnish nation-building. Both within this context and on a broader international plane, the border also acquired meanings of a symbolic boundary ‘between two worlds.’ These worlds appeared as politically, ideologically, and religiously distinct from each other. On the eastern side of the border lay a dictatorial, communist ‘East’ with uncanny continuities of Byzantine Orthodoxy. The western side, meanwhile, was the site of a democratic, capitalist ‘West,’ strongly rooted in Lutheran Protestantism.

Certainly, Finland remained ‘neutral’ and subject to Soviet influence (‘Finlandization’) throughout the Cold War. To this day, Finland has not joined NATO. And yet the border to Russia could be used by the Finnish state to promote an ‘us’ / ‘them’ rhetoric and to foster a sense of national belonging. This strategy could also harness the dire legacy of territorial losses and economic weakening inflicted on Finland by the Soviet Union in the Winter War (1939-40), the outcome of which was largely confirmed by the post-1945 Paris Peace Treaties.

A key strength of Paasi’s book is its multi-scalar approach. This is combined with an institution- and social practice-based analysis which dramatically illuminates the mutually constitutive role of the international, national, regional, and local level in processes of boundary- and place-making. At a micro level, the book examines the role of the border in the everyday lives and modes of thought of the residents of Värtsilä, a factory commune located in the Eastern province of Karelia. This border region had long played a prominent role in Finnish cultural nationalism. From the nineteenth century, it served as the point of origin for the ‘Kalevala,’ an epic poem rooted in Finnish folklore and mythology. Large swathes of this region were among the territories ceded to the Soviet Union. The Cold War border ran directly through Värtsilä, severing its infrastructure and deeply affecting its inhabitants’ local, regional and national identities. Even in the closing years of the Cold War, the ‘spatial identities’ of the region’s inhabitants continued to be influenced by memories of the old commune and utopian images of lost places beyond the closed border. For the younger population of local Finns, meanwhile, the ‘here’ and ‘there’ distinction of the boundary came to acquire less emotionally-charged connotations. It increasingly assumed the quality of an unquestioned reality.

Paasi uses an exceptionally broad range of source material to support his argument. The material encompasses school textbooks and academic geography journals as tools of ‘spatial socialization.’ It also includes newspapers, diaries, travelogues, poems and novels, as well as visual sources such as maps, paintings, advertising posters and photographs (both historical and taken by the author, often set in juxtaposition). These provide the basis for an elucidation of processes of ‘socio-spatial integration and distinction.’⁶³ Finally, the book comprises survey data collected by geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as material gathered in fieldwork and interviews conducted by the author himself. This innovative combination of various source materials, modes of interpretation, and geographical scales has helped to make Paasi’s book a key reference point in scholarly discussions on territoriality, borders and spatial identities.

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9. See, for instance, the important article by Saskia Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,’ Public Culture 12, 2000, 215-32; for an important work at the intersection of global history and spatial history, see Jürgen Osterhammel’s magnum opus The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, German 2009.↩︎

10. Charles S. Maier, Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 3-4, 277-9 (own emphasis); id., ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,’ American Historical Review, 105, 2000, 807-31, here 808 (with fn. 2), 816, 823, 829; see also id., ‘Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood,’ in Emily S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870-1945, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 29-282.↩︎

11. Traditionally, Maier states, ‘geographers and social theorists have written about territory, spatiality, and […] place; historians about territories, but not about territory as such.’ From the perspective of Robert Mayhew, a historical geographer and intellectual historian, Maier’s book demonstrates the importance of ‘writing spatial history’ by placing rather well-known historical material in ‘unfamiliar conjunctions,’ and by approaching it from ‘different angles.’ Charles S. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality, 1600-2000,’ in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006, pp. 32-55, here p. 35; Robert Mayhew, ‘Context Is Everything,’ Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 2017; see also Jessica Wang, ‘Reckoning with the Spatial Turn: Cartography, Territoriality, and International History,’ Diplomatic History 41, 2017, 1010-8.↩︎

12. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality,’ pp. 34, 36; id., Once within Borders, p. 1. The scholarship on territory is vast. See here David Delaney, Territory: A Short Introduction, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005; Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; id., The Birth of Territory, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013; Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006; David Storey, Territory: The Claiming of Space, Harlow: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2001; see also Allan Charles Dawson, Laura Zanotti and Ismael Vaccaro (eds.), Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues between State and Tradition, New York: Routledge, 2014.↩︎

13. John Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,’ Review of International Political Economy 1/1, 1994, 53–80; see also Peter J. Taylor, ‘The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System,’ Progress in Human Geography 18, 1994, 151-62; see, more recently, John Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty: Beyond the Territorial Trap, 2nd ed., Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, first published 2009; Mat Coleman and John Agnew (eds.), Handbook on the Geographies of Power, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018.↩︎

14. See John Agnew, ‘The Origins of Critical Geopolitics,’ in Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 19-32; see also John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2003, first published 1998; for a foundational article see Gearóid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning and American Foreign Policy,’ Political Geography 11, 1992, 190–204.↩︎

15. Leslie W. Hepple, ‘The Revival of Geopolitics,’ Political Geography Quarterly (Supplement) 5/4, 1986, S21–S36, here S33.↩︎

16. See Maier, Once within Borders, pp. 236-76; see also Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and The United States, 1939-1950, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. ‘Critical geopolitics’ has become a vast field of research, populated by some of Agnew’s students, especially Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail), Jo Sharp, and Mathew Coleman, as well as other geographers such as Simon Dalby, Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Peter Taylor. See, especially, Jason Dittmer and Joanne Sharp (eds.), Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2014; Klaus Dodds, Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, first published 2007; Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (eds.), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 2000; Dodds, Kuus and Sharp (eds.), Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics; Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, London and New York: Routledge, 1996; Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby and Paul Routledge (eds.), The Geopolitics Reader, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2006, first published 1998.↩︎

17. Agnew, ‘Territorial Trap,’ 77.↩︎

18. Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 1, 18-9; for Sack’s reflections on ‘space’ more generally, see id., Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: A Geographic Perspective, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980.↩︎

19. See the webpage of this Collaborative Research Centre, funded by the German Research Foundation. Available HTTP: <https://research.uni-leipzig.de/\~sfb1199/> (accessed 19 March 2021).↩︎

20. Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, ‘Global History and the Spatial Turn. From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization,’ Journal of Global History 5, 2010, 149-70; see also Matthias Middell, ‘Die konstruktivistische Wende, der spatial turn und das Interesse an der Globalisierung in der gegenwärtigen Geschichtswissenschaft,’ Geographische Zeitschrift 93/1, 2005, 33-44; id., ‘From Universal History to Transregional Perspectives: The Challenge of the Cultural and Spatial Turn to World and Global History in the 1970s and Today,’ Cultural History 9, 2020, 241-64, here esp. 254-9; Holger Weiss (ed.), Locating the Global: Spaces, Networks, and Interactions from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020; influential here was Michael Geyer, ‘Portals of Globalization,’ in Winfried Eberhard and Christian Lübke (eds.), The Plurality of Europe: Identities and Spaces, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010, pp. 509-20; id. and Charles Bright, ‘World History in a Global Age,’ American Historical Review, 100, 1995, 1034-60; for a recent major study on port cities see John Darwin, Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam, 1830-1930, London: Allen Lane, 2020; see also in this context Christian G. De Vito, ‘History without Scale: The Micro-Spatial Perspective,’ Past and Present 242, 2019, Supplement 14, 348-72; id. and Anne Gerritsen (eds.), Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.↩︎

21. Matthias Middell, ‘Category of Spatial Formats: To What End?’ in Steffi Marung and Matthias Middell (eds.), Spatial Formats under the Global Condition, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, 15-47; see also id. (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Transregional Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Middell also builds a historical periodization, and dialectics, into his framework, which serve to distinguish it from related but less historically oriented contributions, such as the ‘territory, place, scale, network’ (TPSN) approach developed by sociologists Bob Jessop and Neil Brenner and geographer Martin Jones. For the TPSN framework see Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones, ‘Theorizing Sociospatial Relations,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, 2008, 389-401; Bob Jessop, ‘Spatiotemporal Fixes and Multispatial Metagovernance: The Territory, Place, Scale, Network Scheme Revisited,’ in Marung and Middell (eds.), Spatial Formats, 48-77.↩︎

22. See Megan Maruschke, Portals of Globalization: Repositioning Mumbai’s Ports and Zones, 1833–2014, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019; Steffen Wöll, The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020; Deniz Bozkurt-Pekár, Imagining Southern Spaces: Hemispheric and Transatlantic Souths in Antebellum US Writings, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021; Geert Castryck (ed.), Special Issue on ‘The Bounds of Berlin’s Africa: Space-Making and Multiple Territorialities in East and Central Africa,’ International Journal of African Historical Studies 52/1, 2019; see also Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez and Hannes Warnecke-Berger (eds.), Processes of Spatialization in the Americas: Configurations and Narratives, Bern: Peter Lang, 2018; for a full list of publications from the series Dialectics of the Global see the publisher’s webpage. Available HTTP: <https://www.degruyter.com/serial/DIGLO-B/html> (accessed 19 March 2021).↩︎

23. Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 18, 309, 324; see also id., ‘Dominion, Demonstration, and Domination: Religious Doctrine, Territorial Politics, and French Plant Collection,’ in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (ed.), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, pp. 19-33, id., ‘The Archives Made Me Do It,’ Qualitative Sociology 43, 2020, 305-16.↩︎

24. Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geography and new Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 9, 81 (own emphasis); for a further example of how to apply the notion of territoriality to maritime history see Michael Talbot’s chapter in Bavaj, Lawson and Struck (eds.), Doing Spatial History.↩︎

25. It is little wonder that infrastructure features so prominently in Charles Maier’s Once within Borders, pp. 188-214; on railroads, see the classic works by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, German 1977, ch. 3 (‘Railroad Space and Railroad Time’); and Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, New York: W.W. Norton, 2011; as well as Zef M. Segal, The Political Fragmentation of Germany: Formation of German States by Infrastructures, Maps, and Movement, 1815-1866, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; and Benjamin Schenk’s chapter in this volume; on telegraphs, see especially Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil 1906-1930, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004; Michael Mann, Wiring the Nation: Telecommunication, Newspaper-Reportage, and Nation Building in British India 1850-1930, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017; Simone M. Müller, Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016; Heidi J.S. Tworek, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications,1900-1945, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019; on highway construction in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain’s ‘infrastructure state,’ see Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.↩︎

26. Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.↩︎

27. Mukerji, Impossible Engineering, pp. 203-27; Patrick Joyce and Chandra Mukerji, ‘The State of Things: State History and Theory Reconfigured,’ Theory and Society 46, 2017, 1-19, here 2-3; see also Chandra Mukerji, ‘The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power: Strategics, Logistics and Impersonal Rule,’ Sociological Theory 28, 2010, 402-24.↩︎

28. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 88.↩︎

29. Dirk van Laak, ‘Infrastrukturen,’ Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 1.12.2020. Available HTTP: <http://docupedia.de/zg/Laak_infrastrukturen_v1_de_2020> (accessed 19 March 2021) (with an extensive reference section). The description offered here closely follows van Laak’s immensely helpful introduction to the history of infrastructure. See also Dirk van Laak, ‘Garanten der Beständigkeit,’ in Anselm Doering-Manteuffel (ed.), Strukturmerkmale der deutschen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006, pp. 167-80; for English-speaking overviews and case study collections see Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel (eds.), The Promise of Infrastructure, Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Maria Paula Diogo and Dirk van Laak, Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Penelope Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita (eds.), Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser and Erik van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser (eds.), Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850-2000, Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2006; see also Christian Henrich-Franke, ‘Historical Infrastructure Research: A (Sub-)Discipline in the Making?’ in Matthias Korn et al. (eds.), Infrastructuring Publics, Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019, pp. 49-68.↩︎

30. Dirk van Laak, Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft – Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur, Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 2018.↩︎

31. Van Laak, ‘Infrastrukturen.’↩︎

32. Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 15, 37-50, 253-7; id., ‘Globalization, Communication and the Concept of Space in Global History,’ Historical Social Research 35/1, 2010, 19-47, here esp. 27; see also id., Doing Global History: An Introduction in 6 Concepts, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, German 2017, ch. 3 (‘Space: Connectivity and Isolation’); as well as Osterhammel, Transformation of the World.↩︎

33. Ashley Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014; id., ‘Response,’ H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 5/10, 2015, 18-29, here 20.↩︎

34. Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure,’ American Behavioral Scientist 43, 1999, 377-91, here 380. The paraphrase is borrowed from Carse, ‘Response,’ 23.↩︎

35. Carse, ‘Response,’ 23; see also the comments by Chandra Mukerji, H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 5/10, 2015, 11-12; for a recent study on the Suez canal see Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.↩︎

36. Julia Tischler, Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation: The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; id., ‘Cementing Uneven Development: The Central African Federation and the Kariba Dam Scheme,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 40, 2014, 1047-64; see also Jonas van der Straeten and Ute Hasenöhrl, ‘Connecting the Empire: New Research Perspectives on Infrastructures and the Environment in the (Post)Colonial World,’ NTM Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 24, 2016, 355-91.↩︎

37. Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and Urban Imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014; on Los Angeles, also covered by Gandy, see most recently Jan Hansen, ‘Water Infrastructure and Practical Knowledge in Progressive-Era Los Angeles,’ Southern California Quarterly 102, 2020, 385-419; on urban infrastructure and media technologies, see the important study by Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; more generally, see Stephen Graham and Colin McFarlane (eds.), Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context, London: Routledge, 2015; for further infrastructure-related work on cities see the section below on ‘City and Home.’↩︎

38. Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c.1780-1914), Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2009, p. 9; Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, Imperial Technology and ‘Native’ Agency: A Social History of Railways in Colonial India, 1850-1920, London: Routledge, 2018; see more generally David Lambert and Peter Merriman (eds.), Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; for German Southwest Africa, see Julio Decker, ‘Lines in the Sand: Railways and the Archipelago of Colonial Territorialization in German Southwest Africa, 1897-1914,’ Journal of Historical Geography 70, 2020, 74-87.↩︎

39. Maier, Once within Borders, pp. 33, 40, 71.↩︎

40. IBRU’s first conference was held from 14 to 17 September 1989.↩︎

41. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; id., ‘Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century,’ American Historical Review 95, 1990, 1423-51; for the expansion of road and railway networks in the late nineteenth century, see the classic study by Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.↩︎

42. For helpful overviews see Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (eds.), A Companion to Border Studies, Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; Doris Wastl-Walter (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 2012; see also Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; id. (eds.), Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010; Henk van Houtum, Olivier Kramsch and Wolfgang Zierhofer (eds.), B/ordering Space, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; Günther Lottes, ‘Frontiers between Geography and History,’ in Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Eßer (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850, Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2006, pp. 39–71.↩︎

43. Ulf Engel, Marc Boeckler and Detlev Müller-Mahn (eds.), Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa, Leiden: Brill, 2018; Ulf Engel and Paul Nugent (eds.), Respacing Africa, Leiden: Brill, 2010 (see especially the introduction: ‘The Spatial Turn in African Studies,’ pp. 1-9); Allen M. Howard and Richard M. Shain (eds.), The Spatial Factor in African History, Leiden: Brill, 2005; see also the instructive case study by Julie MacArthur, ‘Decolonizing Sovereignty: States of Exception along the Kenya-Somali Frontier,’ American Historical Review 124, 2019, 108-43.↩︎

44. See, for instance, the useful overview chapters by Paul Nugent, ‘Border Towns and Cities in Comparative Perspective,’ in Wilson and Donnan (eds.), Companion to Border Studies, 557-72; id., ‘Border Studies: Temporality, Space, and Scale,’ in Middell (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Transregional Studies, 179-87.↩︎

45. Paul Nugent, Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa: The Centrality of the Margins, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 3-4.↩︎

46. Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier: The Lie of the Borderlands Since 1914, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, p. 273; see also id. and A.I. Asiwaju (eds.), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities, London and New York: Pinter, 1996.↩︎

47. See Paul Nugent, ‘Africa’s Re-Enchantment with Big Infrastructure: White Elephants Dancing in Virtuous Circles?’ in Jon Schubert, Ulf Engel and Elísio Macamo (eds.), Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa: Beyond the Resource Curse, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 22-40; id. and Isabella Soi, ‘One-Stop Border Posts in East Africa: State Encounters of the Fourth Kind,’ Journal of Eastern African Studies 14, 2020, 433-54.↩︎

48. Albert Demangeon and Lucien Febvre, Le Rhin: Problèmes d’histoire et d’économie, Paris: Colin, 1935, pp. 16-17, 72, 170; see also Claude Courlet, ‘La frontière: Couture ou coupure?’ Économie et Humanisme 301, 1988, 5-12; ‘Entretien avec Thomas Serrier: Europa – Notre Histoire,’ Revue Abibac, 27 November 2019. Available HTTP: <https://revue-abibac.fr/2019/11/27/entretien-avec-thomas-serrier-europa-notre-histoire/> (accessed 19 March 2021).↩︎

49. Etienne François, Jörg Seifarth and Bernhard Struck, ‘Einleitung: Grenzen und Grenzräume. Erfahrungen und Konstruktionen,’ in id. (eds.), Grenzen: Räume, Erfahrungen, Konstruktionen, 17.-20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/Main and New York: Campus, 2006, pp. 7-29, here p. 21.↩︎

50. Georg Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Space,’ 1908, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, London: Sage, 1997, p. 142.↩︎

51. Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, ‘Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,’ Journal of World History 8, 1997, 211-42; Oscar J. Martínez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994; Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Jagged Landscapes: Conceptualizing Borders and Boundaries in the History of Human Societies,’ Journal of Borderlands Studies 31, 2016, 1-21.↩︎

52. See Edward S. Casey, The World on Edge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017, esp. pp. 7-27; id., ‘Border versus Boundary at La Frontera,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, 2011, 384-98; id. and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, University of Texas Press, 2014; Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State, Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999; Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (eds.), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; see also Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, ‘The Political Sociology and Political Geography of Borders,’ in William Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Political Sociology, Los Angeles: Sage, 2017, 330-46; Martina Löw and Gunter Weidenhaus, ‘Borders that Relate: Conceptualizing Boundaries in Relational Space,’ Current Sociology Monograph 65, 2017, 553-70; Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.↩︎

53. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.↩︎

54. D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.↩︎

55. Thomas Simpson, The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 7, 67.↩︎

56. Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015; see also Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.↩︎

57. Nianshen Song, Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 10; see also id., ‘A Buffer against Whom? Rethinking the Qing-Chosŏn Border Region,’ Geopolitics, published online: 21 Dec 2020. Available HTTP: <https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1844670> (accessed 19 March 2021).↩︎

58. Alyssa M. Park, Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.↩︎

59. See C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006; Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946, London: I.B. Tauris, 1999; Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trade, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005; see also Peter C. Perdue, ‘Crossing Borders in Imperial China,’ in Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, Peter C. Perdue (eds.), Asia Inside Out: Connected Places, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015, 195-218; id., ‘Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia,’ The International History Review 20, 1998, 263-86; as well as the chapter by Lisa Hellman in Bavaj, Lawson and Struck (eds.), Doing Spatial History.↩︎

60. See Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006; Andreas Rutz, Die Beschreibung des Raums: Territoriale Grenzziehungen im Heiligen Römischen Reich, Cologne: Böhlau, 2018; Luca Scholz, Borders & Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; Machteld Venken, Peripheries at the Centre: Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe, New York: Berghahn 2021; David H. Kaplan and Jouni Hakli (eds.), Boundaries and Place: European Borderlands in Geographical Context, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002; Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; Sagi Schaefer, States of Division: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; Jason B. Johnson, Divided Village: The Cold War in the German Borderlands, London and New York: Routledge, 2017; Astrid Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; see also the review article by Andrew S. Tompkins, ‘Binding the Nation, Bounding the State: Germany and Its Borders,’ German History 37, 2019, 77-100. A global scope offers the stimulating volume by Paul Readman, Cynthia Radding and Chad Bryant (eds.), Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.↩︎

61. Anssi Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border, New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1996; id., ‘Boundaries as Social Practice and Discourse: The Finnish-Russian Border,’ Regional Studies 33, 1999, 669-80, here esp. 676; see also, more generally, id., ‘Place and Region: Regional Worlds and Words,’ Progress in Human Geography 26, 2002, 802-11; id., ‘Region and Place: Regional Identity in Question,’ Progress in Human Geography 27, 2003, 475-85; id., ‘Place and Region: Looking Through the Prism of Scale,’ Progress in Human Geography 28, 2004, 536-46; id., ‘Border Studies Reanimated: Going Beyond the Territorial/Relational Divide,’ Environment and Planning A 44, 2012, 2303-9; id., John Harrison and Martin Jones (eds.), Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018.↩︎

62. See, especially, Peter J. Taylor, Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality, 3rd ed., New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1993, first published 1985; id., ‘The State as Container.’↩︎

63. Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness, pp. 7-15.↩︎