Primer: Borderlands History

The definition of borderlands has shifted since the term came into prominence through the work of Herbert Eugene Bolton in the early twentieth century. Bolton defined borderlands as the “regions between Florida and California, now belonging to the United States, over which Spain held sway for centuries” (Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands). Bolton’s “Spanish Borderlands” scholarship was intended as a counterpoint to Frederick Jackson Turner’s Anglo-centric frontier thesis, which foregrounded a westward-moving frontier as the crucible that forged America’s exceptional national character (Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”). Traditionally associated with Spanish colonialism in territory that became the US Southeast and Southwest, borderlands history now encompasses a broader set of themes, processes, and social groups, and spaces worldwide as well as varying time periods ranging from the Ancient Meditteranean world, Ming China, and imperial Russia to early modern France, modern Iran, and the twenty-first-century Baltic littoral. Some scholars examine borderlands in a comparative perspective, including comparing borderlands across different continents and periods. While the term “borderlands” has no fixed definition, it can refer to spaces of encounter between different peoples and political entities. Generally considered by scholars as both spaces and processes, borderlands can be viewed as "ambiguous and often-unstable realms where boundaries are also crossroads, peripheries are also central places, homelands are also passing-through places, and the end points of empire are also forks in the road" (Hämäläinen and Truett, “On Borderlands”). Influences on the evolution of the field of borderlands history include scholarship in American Indian, Asian American, Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Asian American studies programs that grew out of US social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the new social history, the “cultural turn,” postmodernism, and more recently the “transnational turn.” Borderlands history moved from a marginal to mainstream field of academic inquiry around the 1990s and is currently practiced by scholars worldwide. Although rooted in the discipline of history, the study of borderlands is now an interdisciplinary and a multidisciplinary endeavor, involving disciplines ranging from anthropology and linguistics to sociology and psychology.

A borderlands interpretative framework can be used to enrich the craft of world history. The concept of borderlands provides useful insights into circulations, connections, exchanges, flows, and networks across borders, ranging from capital, diseases, and goods to ideas, technologies, and people. Borderlands, which excels as an analytical concept for the study of distinct spaces of contact and exchange, specifically contested, fluid, and plural “contact zones,” can be applied to further understand intergroup dynamics, identity formation, and cross-cultural interactions in world history (Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”). With its emphasis on movements across borders, entanglements between different peoples, and convergence and overlap between political entities, borderlands history can be fruitfully combined with cognate approaches and concepts used to study world history such as globalization, imperialism, intellectual exchange, migration and diaspora, and comparative, transcultural, and transnational histories. Borderlands history, which considers traditionally marginalized peoples as central actors, examines pasts not coterminous with national periodization and master narratives, and focuses on spaces characterized by contingency, heterogeneity, and liminality, can raise new research questions for world historians. In addition, it can provide them with fresh and distinctive ways to examine events, experiences, perspectives, stories, and spatial-temporal configurations beyond Eurocentric and nation-state frameworks of analysis.

Borderlands history does not mean an absence or neglect of the state, given the state often influenced borderlands in significant ways and vice versa, but rather the state is not a self-evident starting, end, or focal point for historical inquiry. Furthermore, it does not mean confining analysis within local or regional contexts since borderlands shaped and were shaped by events and processes at larger scales including the global, as demonstrated in the “Short Teaching Module: Connecting Local and Global History via Mercantile Networks.” 

Besides physical borders, borderlands historians examine non-physical borders or conceptual categories such as culture, ethnicity, gender, nation, race, religion, and so on that people used to understand and navigate borderland worlds. One example of a primary source that illuminates the making and crossing of borders, both physical and conceptual, while underscoring the limitations of discrete national histories are maps. While maps help create borders that seem immutable or natural, all borders are social constructs. Because constructing borders is a form of power that benefits some people over others, borders are invariably contested, and thereby always unstable and unfinished (Orsi, “Construction and Contestation”). In the case of national borders, they may appear to be natural or static and are delimited on maps as bounded but are in fact sites of ongoing processes such as conflict, contestation, exchange, interaction, negotiation, and violence. A case in point is the “Map of the Partition of Israel and Palestine.”

Borderlands history, in whatever form its future direction takes, will be indispensable to the study of a central aspect of the human experience worldwide and across eras: border making and crossing. Borderlands approaches, particularly their insights into borders and distinct spaces of human interaction on the edges of political entities, enrich scholarship and teaching on the global past beyond a nation-state unit of analysis.

“AHR Forum: Bringing Regionalism Back to History” and “Forum Essay Responses.” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1156-220, 1221-39.

Adelman, Jeremy, and Stephen Aron. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 814-41.

Baud, Michiel, and Willem Van Schendel. “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands.” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 211-42.

Bolton, Herbert Eugene. The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921).

Gutiérrez, Ramón A., and Elliott Young. “Transnationalizing Borderlands History.” Western History Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 26–53.

Hämäläinen, Pekka, and Samuel Truett. “On Borderlands.” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 338-61.

Hernández, Kelly Lytle. “Borderlands and the Future History of the American West.” Western Historical Quarterly 42 (Autumn 2011): 325-30.

Lee, John W. I., and Michael North. Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North America. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Orsi, Jared. “Construction and Contestation: Toward a Unifying Methodology for Borderlands History.” History Compass 12/5 (2014): 433-43.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33-40.

Readman, Paul, Cynthia Radding, and Chad Bryant, eds. Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Truett, Samuel, and Elliott Young, eds. Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1894): 199-227.

Barry McCarron is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Sun Yat-sen University. He earned his PhD in history from Georgetown University and worked as a faculty fellow at New York University. He is finalizing a book project based on his doctoral dissertation, which won the 2016 World History Association Dissertation Prize. Titled China and Ireland in the World, this will be the first book to examine the history of connections between China and Ireland and Chinese and Irish encounters in global perspective.