From the earliest sacred boundary markers in ancient Egypt to the alleged fault lines of contemporary “civilizations” efforts to fix the outer limits of individual and collective societies and polities reflect the basic needs for group identity, stability and security. Yet the process of demarcation creates “the other” on the far side of the real or imaginary line that by its very nature constitutes a potential threat. Thus boundary maintenance is an ambiguous process.^[1] Moreover, in practice boundary lines whether territorial or social tend to be porous rather than impenetrable. Nomads, pilgrims, migrants, raiders, smugglers cross from one side to the other as do converts, émigrés, class cross overs. In order to accommodate these ambiguous and porous elements into an understanding of the way in which human beings seek to divide and segregate themselves it is useful to resort to the concept of frontiers. In contrast to linear boundaries frontiers represent an intermediate zone of contact between two or more distinctive cultures or polities. To be sure the contrast should not obscure the tension between drawing linear boundaries and the evolution of frontiers. The concept and ecology of frontiers has always played a crucial role in the construction of ideologies and institutional structures, in a word of the internal dimensions of the state. The existence of boundaries and frontiers are as ancient as the state and the history of frontiers begins as far back as Herodotus and the ancient chroniclers of China.^[2] Even then frontiers acquired a symbolic meaning. But the frontier as myth is a recent invention. It was not until the nineteenth century that the frontier was interpreted as the defining character of a nation or a civilization. One indication of the changing meaning of frontier in history is the evolution of the term itself.
In Europe the word “frontiers” first appears in French in the fourteenth century to indicate a facade in architecture or a military order of battle and only gradually came to mean the limits of state control. It passed into English and was widely used in the sixteenth century to mean a barrier against attack. In the thirteenth century the Slavic word greniz or granitsa was applied, particularly by the Teutonic Order, to denote the area of contact between Germans and Slavs and replaced the Gothic term mark.^[3] In the eighteenth century scholars in France and Great Britain were obsessed with classificatory project that began with natural history but expanded to chart the boundaries of global geography setting the stage for the great transformation of frontiers as a concept during the French Revolution.^[4]
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the scholarly literature gradually made the distinction clearer between boundaries and frontiers by distinguishing between a linear and a spatial concept, shifting from place to process, and introducing symbol and mythology as new disciplines like anthropology and most recently cultural studies interacted with geography and history. The epistemological transformation was not itself a linear progression, nor has it been uniformly accepted. The most stubborn resistance has been mounted by the advocates of geopolitics who remained firmly attached to the idea of frontiers as constituting a power grid even when they have shown unmistakably signs of cultural or ideological origin.^[5]
It is well over a hundred years ago that Frederick Jackson Turner published his now world famous influential essay on the frontier in American history. The great explanatory power of his vision resided in its claim to explain the uniqueness of American civilization.^[6] Paradoxically, it also became a model for scholars seeking to adopt or refute its implications for a whole series of different societies that shared, however, the similar feature of a moving frontier. Turner's concept, then, still serves as the main frame of comparative approaches to frontiers in world history. It is not surprising, given the large number of American historians and the academic culture of methodological restlessness in the U.S. that the main changes in conceptualizing the history of frontiers has been dominated by revisions of Turner's original thesis.^[7] As a result a triptych of Turner iconography has emerged. Flanking one side of the central panel of the traditional Turner is a different spatial concept linked to the rise and consolidation of the centralized state that developed out of the French experience as interpreted by the Annales school. Lucien Febrve insisted, for example, that the study of frontiers could only be carried out in connection with the nature of the state which defines the political and military sense of the word.^[8]
On the other side of the triptych a third panel represents the symbolic geographies, that is the construction of imaginary borders on the basis of normative evaluations of the “Other.” Explicitly or implicitly symbolic frontiers have been employed since ancient times to differentiate between the civilized and the barbarian worlds. These divisions have taken many forms since then. Some of them have been dualist like Europe and Asia (or Occident and Orient) others have been triads like the three worlds of the Cold War (the West, the Communist Bloc and the Third World). Such symbolic frontiers have also been enlisted to make finer distinctions as between western and eastern Europe or the Near East, Middle East and Far East. Most of these distinctions have been made by West European and American scholars. They have met strong resistance from those outside the magic circle or else from the new disciplinary approaches in western scholarship.
It has only been in the past half-century that anthropology sociology and cultural studies have contributed to the widening debate over frontiers. In the nineteen fifties the anthropologists began to engage in active field work on the margins of sedentary and nomadic societies. Owen Lattimore, although not academically trained as an anthropologist, was a pioneer in this approach, as was Frederik Barth whose work took a very different direction.^[9] Geographers absorbed in local and regional studies felt the influence of their colleagues in cultural studies. They began to redefine space and frontiers in terms of linguistic and social contexts.^[10] The so-called textual approach appealed strongly to non-European post-colonialist scholars who coined the term “textualizing the world” meaning the mental construction of the globe and its discursive sub-divisions to fit the European vision.^[11] Both sociologists and anthropologists explored ways in which ethnic identity and concepts of citizenship corresponded to the drawing of territorial boundaries.^[12] Finally semioticians like Iuri Lotman perceived frontiers as “zones of cultural bilingualism.”^[13] The more adventurous historians rapidly absorbed these insights in expanding the study of frontiers. But it must be admitted that the first theorist of the frontiers, the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner was no stranger to what is now called the multidisciplinary approach, although in his day the term had not yet been invented. Nevertheless, the last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a virtual explosion of multidisciplinary studies of frontiers. And beyond that there has been a boom in the comparative study of frontiers that always seems in one way or another to come back to Turner, if only to attempt to refute him.
The following attempt to design a comparative structure for the study of frontiers is based on two criteria. First, the historiographical triptych outlined above provides a rough guide to the evolution of thinking about frontiers. Second, a parallel analysis locates the ecological and cultural factors that shaped the three basic types of frontiers. Using both triads as points of reference yields the following model: consolidated state frontiers; dynamic frontiers of advancing settlements and symbolic frontiers. To be sure, features of two or even all three of these types coincide with one another. In order to avoid overstressing uniformities and make way for diversity of historical experiences, a variety of sub-types have also been introduced. In all cases frontiers should be envisaged as zones as distinct from linear boundaries. At the same time, the two phenomena are often closely inter-related. Boundaries may be embedded in frontiers to a greater or lesser degree. That is, the political or territorial delimitation may run more or less closely to the features of physical geography or ethno-linguistic divisions. Or by contrast they may have little or no correspondence to either geography or culture but rather designate the limits of military conquest.^[14]
The existence of boundary markers, fixed military emplacements and walls designating the edge of state sovereignty long preceded the use of the term frontier. The earliest historical evidence of boundaries expressed the need of the state to define the limits of public authority, as in the empires of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt or later of private property in the Greek city states. In both cases boundary markers were endowed with a sacred character and their removal signified the victory of a conqueror.^[15] The Athenian and Roman Empires, and independently the Chinese and Sasanian Empires introduced two additional features: the construction of walls or defense lines and second the definition of peoples on the other side as culturally inferior, that is barbarian, perhaps the first instance of a symbolic frontier. The attempts of the Roman, Sasanian and Chinese emperors to establish fixed boundaries repeatedly collapsed or eroded under the pressure of migration and raiding. But in their relations with the “barbarians” ancient empires also permitted even encouraged the development of mutually beneficial cultural and economic exchanges within a broad and ill-defined frontier zone. But the outer defenses of the three empires differed in one vital respect. The Chinese walls delimited two very distinct cultures, the settled agricultural population and the pastoral nomads. By contrast, in the Roman barbarian frontier the social organization and way of life on both sides were similar. The Sasanians faced two kinds of frontiers. To the north they defended against the nomads, whom they regarded as barbarians, coming down from the Caucasus. To the west their enemy was the Roman and later Byzantine Empire which they regarded as an equal.^[16]
A revisionist view of the frontier in Chinese history has attached new and unprecedented importance to the complex interaction between China and Inner Asia.^[17] In China earthen walls were constructed from the earliest times as a defense against outside attack from the north, but they also facilitated centralization and unification. The building of the Great Wall of China signaled the retreat of the Ming dynasty at the end of the sixteenth century from a policy of active defense of the frontiers against the steppe nomads. The shift foreshadowed its political decline. In 1644 it was no longer able to contain the invasion of the “barbarian” Manchus.^[18]
Relations between the Romans and peoples on the periphery of their empire varied greatly according to location and time. Julius Caesar was the first Roman to build a wall between Lake Leman and the Jura, but he did not yet employ the term “limes.” The system of walls that developed in the imperial period especially in Britain and Tunisia were designed less to exclude and more to control the movement of people and goods. The collapse of the empire in the west is increasingly regarded as a process of mutual accommodation of Romans and barbarian tribes through the emergence of a military frontier elite of the warlord type.^[19]
Islamic state frontiers represent a transitional type between the ancient empires and the modern European state system. The Ottoman concept of frontiers emerged from the fusion of three traditions that shaped its self-identification as a state: the nomadic warrior, the Islamic religious and the Byzantine imperial. In the tenth century Turkmen tribes migrated from Central Asia into the Mesopotamian region where they converted to Islam and occupied the contested space all along the Byzantine frontiers. By the thirteenth century there had arisen a culture of holy warriors (gazhis) with a corresponding type on the Byzantine side (Akritai) at first composed of Greek but increasingly replaced by Turkmen tribesmen recruited from the other side. In this intermediate zone war and trade often alternated in a pattern similar to that on Roman and Chinese frontiers and facilitated the penetration and conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Turks.^[20] Embodying the precepts of Islam, the Ottoman Turks the world into two cultural spheres, Dar ul-Islam, the abode of Islam and the Dar ul-Harb, the abode of war. Therein lay the justification for the expansion of the frontiers in all directions. But this rigid duality could not be strictly maintained. The erosion of the Islamic warrior tradition eroded over the following centuries bringing change to the concept of frontiers. The first sign was the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 that “spelled the definitive end of the frontier areas (the acat) as assembly plants of new political enterprises and of the Ottoman polity as a frontier principality.”^[21] The second was the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 ending a long war with the Habsburgs and signaling a shift in policy away from the ever-expanding frontier justified by jihad to a more defensive posture resting upon frontier fortresses, mediation and fixed boundaries recognized by international treaties with Christian states. The third was the Treaty of Kucuk-Kainardji in 1774 that established the right of a Christian State, the Russian Empire, to make diplomatic representations on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire thus blurring its external and internal frontiers.^[22] But there were internal forces at work as well that weakened the Ottoman defense of its frontiers once the forward movement of its warrior had been checked. After the sixteenth century the central government was no longer able to resort to its traditional policy of surgun, the forced migration of Turkish peasants from Anatolia to the frontier provinces that had played such an important role in the Turkization of parts of southeastern Europe.^[23] For reasons specific to the reproductive cultures of the Muslim and Christian populations, the former lost ground to the latter throughout southeastern Europe.^[24]
The Ottoman Empire was more successful on its Islamic frontiers. It was able to control the movement of tribal societies in the North Arabian desert, Upper Egypt and the southern regions of North Africa.^[25] In other frontier provinces like Trans-Jordan the reforming impulse of the Tanzimat in mid-nineteenth century provided public services, land reform and a market economy that strengthened ties between the center and periphery.^[26] In the Caucasus Ottoman frontier policy was always more successful along the Black Sea Coast than in the highlands of Armenia and Kurdistan. The Circassians and Georgians were drawn into the commercial life of the Black Sea dominated by the Turks. They supplied highly valued slaves to the armies and harems of the sultan. But once the Turks attempted to drive the Iranians out of the highlands they encountered stiff resistance from the mountain tribes that the Russians, much to their grief, subsequently inherited on their southern frontier.^[27]
In the case of Iran all the ruling dynasties from the Seljuks to the end of the Qajar had their origins in tribal confederacies on the periphery of the country. As one leading authority put it: “tribal groups have occupied Iran's borders for centuries because the peripheries of state power were where the tribal formations flourished and tribal groups endured.”^[28] This meant on the one hand that Iranian frontiers were among the most ill-defined, porous and fluctuating among the Islamic states, indeed of all Eurasia. On the other hand there was a definite concept of “Iranshahr” that has persisted from the fall of the Sasanian Empire until the present day.^[29] Like China Iran always confronted a nomadic presence but from three directions: the northwest, that is the Caucasus, the north, the Turkomens and the northeast, the Afghans. The expansion its frontiers depended upon the ability of certain charismatic figures like Shah Ismail, Shah Abbas and Nadir Shah to conquer the outer lands combining military skills with universalist, Islamic claims of the messianic Shia branch.
Aside from the tribal frontiers, there were also several religious frontiers, Shia-Sunni in the west with the Ottomans and in Central Asia with the Uzbeks, and Islamic-Christian in the Caucasus with Georgia. Another complexity of Iran's religious frontiers was the existence of the messianic Sufi sects among the tribes in the frontier zone. This provided an ideological bond in frequent rebellions against the authority of a centralized state.^[30] Iran shared with China the persistent problem of frontier instability replete with frequent breakdowns leading to invasions and establishment of nomad dynasties. Like the Ottoman Empire the Iranian retreat from the outer lands and contraction of frontiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by greater secularization of the state, and the loss of the last vestiges of messianism. In both cases, “the psychological impact of the abandonment of the idea of the 'ever expanding frontier' of Islam should not be underestimated.”^[31] Under the pressure of the west European colonial powers and the Russian Empire the frontiers of the Ottoman and Iranian Empires were redrawn and consolidated to approximate those of a conventional nation state.
State frontiers in western Europe took shape during the transition from feudal fragmentation to a centralized absolutist monarchy. In France which set the pace frontiers as the limit of state power evolved from a line of fortresses and armed encampments toward a fixed line that reflected ideological, financial and linguistic uniformities. In 1815 a precise territorial delimitation was laid down by a scientific cartography; the French government produced the first map in the world drawn on a geodesic triangulation. Before the surveyor's triumph propagandists of the ancient regime and politicians of the revolution both claimed for France its “natural frontiers” first in the form of the four rivers (Rhone, Saone, Meuse and Scheldt) and then invoking Strabo and Caesar the quadrilateral limits of ancient Gaul, the Rhine, Alps and the Ocean. To these frontiers enshrined in hoary tradition, the revolutionaries added the concept of “national” frontiers which, not coincidentally, corresponded to the “natural” frontiers. They performed this political slight of hand before it was entirely clear who or what constituted a nation. It required another century before the administrative, customs and juridical instruments were sufficiently firmly established to enforce the claim.^[32] In the process the national territorial boundary took shape as much from the activities of the local, frontier communities as by the central state. As a result the inhabitants of frontier areas retained their special sense of place even as they accepted their identity with the nation.^[33]
The French or more precisely the Jacobin model that the frontiers of a state ought to correspond to the “natural” and the “national” with one language and one culture was internationalized for France, ironically, in the first Treaty of Vienna. But following Napoleon's ill-fated gamble to return to power, a vengeful Europe deprived France of its “natural” Rhine frontier, never to be recovered. However, the ideal French-Jacobin type was widely diffused throughout Europe (for example in the separation of Belgium from Holland in 1832, the separation of Norway and Sweden in 1902 and with modifications in the unification of Italy, Germany and Greece), Latin America and, more arbitrarily imposed with the participation of the British in Africa and the Middle East with less happy results.
If the colonial boundaries represented one misapplied sub type of the French model, then the small states of central and southeastern Europe represented another. The prolonged existence of multicultural empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian) shaped by dynastic interests delayed into the twentieth century the shift from historic to ethno-linguistic (national) frontiers with dire consequences. By this time internal migration, colonization, forced resettlement had created a kaleidoscope of peoples who could not be neatly compartmentalized by drawing linear frontiers. By this time too the French model had been redefined by the United States. President Wilson's published war aims, the so-called Fourteen Points, drove the concept of national frontiers to the reductio ad absurdum of its French logic. In fact, the French statesman Georges Clemenceau rejected his own offspring in the name of security. So the postwar boundaries of Europe remained in most cases frontier zones cutting through communities with utter disregard for their ethno-linguistic unity.
Similarly, redrawing the map of southeastern Europe as the Ottoman Empire gradually receded and finally together with the Habsburg Monarch collapsed in war and revolution was a cartographic nightmare. From the emergence of an autonomous Serbia and Greece in the early decades of the nineteenth century the results took the form of a series of unhappy compromises between the conflicting interests of the great powers and the aspiration of the subjugated peoples. The latter were striving not only for independence but also for frontiers based on historicist claims. In other words the wars of national liberation turned out to be something more than that. In most cases the formerly oppressed nationalities sought to emulate the structures of the very empires that had been their principled purpose to destroy. Throughout the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century claims were advanced for a Greater Serbia (and realized in the original form of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), Greater Croatia, Greater Romania, Greater Hungary, Greater Bulgaria and Greater Greece, claims that were mutually irreconcilable.
German frontiers represent another sub-type of the European state system. They exhibited features of the consolidated European state and the dynamic, moving frontier. In the north, west and south the German frontiers evolved along the lines of the French model. But in the vast, geographically ill-defined and ethnically mixed space of the German-Slavic encounter the discrepancy between sovereignty and settlement remained unresolved for a thousand years. For German statesmen, publicists and intellectuals from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century the task of consolidating a fixed state frontier with the Slavic east became a profoundly disturbing socio-psychological as well as political problem producing its share of historical myths.^[34]
The ancient frontier problem between “Teuton and Slav” encapsulated in the phrase “Drang nach Osten” was actually a complex process of colonization and conquest. However, it would be a mistake to portray the interaction of Germans and Slavs as one driven by a conscious, unmediated ethnic or proto-national antagonism. Historians have recently pointed out that the colonization of the east over a period of many centuries was not exclusively “German” but multinational. It was more often peaceful than warlike, by invitation rather than by right of conquest, followed by integration if not assimilation into the local body politic.^[35] At the same time it is just as important not to neglect the significance of the prolonged political conflict between the east German Marks (Brandenburg and Pomerania) as well as the Teutonic Knights in the Baltikum and the Poles over their frontier.
The supreme political propagandist of his day, Frederick II was one of the first to promote the idea of Prussia's eastern borders as the line between civilization and barbarism. On the eve of the partitions he posted his scurrilously satirical poem on Poland to Voltaire; the Poles, he quipped, were “the last people in Europe.”^[36] To be sure, ever since the Counter-Reformation the Poles had been busy inventing their own frontier of civilization to the East against the barbarous Russians, a myth that gained strength after the partitions.^[37]
Throughout the nineteenth century the drawing of real and imaginary frontiers to the East was a sub-theme in a set of larger concerns of Germans who were seeking to define their cultural identity and construct a unified state. Was the goal to create a national state in the French (Jacobin) model or by incorporating other nationalities (Poles and Danes) a multinational empire? It became clear at the Frankfort Assembly in 1848 that the former alternative was not, in fact possible, because a Kleindeutsch solution would leave too many Germans outside and the Grossdeutsch solution would bring too many non-Germans within the “nation-state.”^[38] Thus did the consequences of the Drang nach Osten haunt the Germans for another hundred years.
Although the eastern territorial boundary of Prussia-Germany did not change during the tumultuous years of German unification and throughout the duration of the Kaiserreich, a vocal minority within the German political and cultural elite expressed mounting concern over the threat of de-Germanization of the frontier provinces. Demographic trends were against them. Their fears were reflected in a rising trajectory of anti-Jewish and anti-Polish assimilationist legislation right down to 1914.^[39]
The First World War opened a new, radical phase in the definition of the eastern frontiers of Germany. The most consistent and universally held of all the war aims debated in Germany throughout the conflict was the acquisition of a Polish territorial strip and the expulsion of its Polish population.^[40] German opinion was split over how far and in which form to expand the frontiers in the East.^[41] But the most grandiose aims belonged to the army, in particular to Fieldmarshall Eric Ludendorff whose plans for a military utopia in the “Warland” prefigured Hitler's policy of Lebensraum.^[42] Germany's fears of being engulfed in a “Slavic flood” from beyond the frontiers was a self-fulfilling prophecy realized in 1945 when a thousand years of Drang nach Osten were obliterated. Germany's eastern boundaries were finally set to rest. They had come into line with the French model. But for the following half century there remained the larger questions of where were the symbolic frontiers of Europe and whether the “barbarians” were still at the gates.
The dynamic frontier may be characterized as an advancing line of settlements engaged primarily in agricultural or mixed economy confronting a nomadic and/or technologically less developed culture. In the modern period three sub-types may be taken as examples: the United States, the former British dominions and the Imperial Russian and Chinese Empires. The U.S. was the only former British colony where, once it had achieved independence, the frontier experience became both a national myth and a dominant theme in the national historiography. In the other former British dominions geographical and political factors placed the idea of the frontier in a different context. The continental expansion of Russia and China differed from both the “Anglo-Saxon” sub-types in two important ways. They tended to assimilate or tolerate the conquered peoples and their cultures rather than expel or destroy them as in the case of the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. (South Africa was a special case to be discussed below); and they were forced to compete with other major powers, including one another, for the contested space on their expanding frontiers.
In the U.S. neither the revisionist historians nor the comparativists dealing with international dimensions have been able to free themselves entirely from the Turnerian concept of the frontier even as they demolished its tenets one by one. What Turner did was to establish the frontier as a historical problem and to interpret it as the way of defining what it meant to be an American. The complexity of his approach guaranteed its longevity even as a foil. He combined elements of economic geography, social structure and ideology even though he was not always clear or consistent in drawing the relationship among them. His brilliant essays added up to something less than a full blown theory and left the way open for multiple interpretation, extensive revision and critical refutation. Like many great themes in historiography its importance lies more in the literature it generated than in its original propositions. The debate over his legacy took place in two arenas: the national (American) and the comparative (global).
In American historiography the revisions and reformulations of the Turner thesis radiate around two conceptual poles: new methodologies, particularly anthropology and environmental studies, and fresh interpretive perspectives reflecting the shifting concerns of a restless society in search of itself. At present, the task of charting the currents of the debate has itself become a minor cottage industry. ^[43] Turner's frontier as an advancing line of settlement has given way, in the work of the regionalists, to a multiplicity of locations. But Turner's tendency to conflate the frontier as a line and “the Great West” as a region continues to be a source of confusion. There has also been a trend in American historiography away from spatial to cultural definitions of the frontier, although Turner himself made room for both place and process in his own work.
Turner's concept of the frontier as dividing “savagery from civilization” or alternatively as a forward movement into “empty lands” has yielded, under the influence of anthropologists, to the idea of the frontier as a zone of interaction involving two or more previously distinct societies which engaged in a variety of cultural and commercial “frontier exchanges” between Native Americans and colonists or settlers. Turner's vision of the West as an environment that bred rugged individualism and privileged self-reliance also encountered criticism from historians and sociologists who gave equal prominence to social collectivities. More recently the critics have uncovered a darker side of the frontiersman in the legacy of a gun culture and the persistent cult of violence.^[44]
Environmentalist historians exploded Turner's arcadian picture of natural harmony on the frontier by exposing the depredations, manipulations and “species shifting” impact of the western advance.^[45] Turner's insistence on the defining role of the frontier experience in building American democratic institutions failed to account for the contributions of urban life and the antecedent values that the pioneers brought with them from the eastern seaboard or Europe. At one end of the historiographical spectrum Turner's thesis lies in ruins, and some historians even go so far as to reject or excoriate the term “frontier.” At the other end, attempts have been made to synthesize the newer ideas on race, class and gender and region in order to rescue once again the place of the frontier in American history. But a multicultural interpretation of the frontier requires a radical reversal of the original myth. Not only does the advancing frontier signify the virtual extermination of the Native American population but it takes on a plurality of meanings for other ethnic groups. Their frontiers are formed and advance after the official closing of the frontier in 1892 that cause Turner to bemoan the loss of what he regarded as a unique part of American life. In the twentieth century the territorial and social mobility of the Hispanic-, Afro- and Asian-Americans in the twentieth century constituted for them just as formative an experience as the pioneers of the nineteenth century.^[46]
At the same time that new ethnic frontiers were being discovered and invented the Turner thesis found a fresh field for development and exploitation in the realm of mass culture. The commercialization of American history found the perfect vehicle in the myth of the frontier. The adaptation of frontier images by different forms of popular culture has penetrated the world of mass entertainment, advertising and journalism. The “Western” film as a genre enjoys enduring popularity because it is able to incorporate changes in social values while retaining the centrality of the myth. New social and environmental concerns have left deep marks on the Turnerian stereotypes of the Old West. In films and television the heroic cowboy in the white hat, the intrepid pioneer fighting off the Indians, the U.S. cavalry riding to the rescue at the last moment have become more ambiguous figures. Black cowboys and troopers, environmentally sensitive Native Americans and even women gun-slingers have challenged the dominant white male image. He survives only as the Marlboro man making his last stand on American billboards for a product that must advertise its harmfulness to health.
An analysis of other examples of dynamic, advancing frontiers cannot proceed without reference to the comparative approach largely inspired by if not always in agreement with the Turner thesis and its revisions. His influence has been felt most keenly in the historiographies of the former dominions of the British Empire, the Russian and Chinese Empires. In one of the more successful modifications and extensions of the Turner thesis a group of historians from North America and South Africa produced a well-designed comparative analysis of their respective frontiers.
The North American-South African comparison sought to achieve theoretical clarity and consistency by establishing a universal definition rather than adopting the American experience or Turner's version of it even though his inspiration remained clear. There were three essential elements in their structural frame: first the geographical-territorial with “frontier” considered as zone rather than a line with different “carrying capacities, attractiveness and resources”; second, the cultural seen through the interpenetration between two previously distinct societies, one indigenous and the other intrusive; and third, the operational, that is the process of opening the frontier dated by the arrival of representatives of the intrusive society and closing the frontier dated by the establishment of a single political hegemony through either extermination (Tasmania), expulsion (Trans Mississippi), subjugation (South Africa) or incorporation (Brazil). Closing the frontier was a more complex stage because it was variable and potentially reversible. as it indeed proved to be in South Africa. Moving from the universal model to the specific, the comparison of North America and South Africa revealed more differences than similarities although the white communities in both places mythologized the frontier experience as formative in to their national identity. Before the recent reversal of apartheid in South Africa the critical difference appeared to be the different relationship of the indigenous people in the U.S. and South Africa to capitalism.^[47]
Comparative studies with Turnerian overtones of the frontier experience in Canada, Australia and New Zealand suggest that despite superficial similarities with the U.S. different topographies and the prolonged tutorship of the metropolitan center in Great Britain prevented the rise of a frontier exceptionalism.^[48] In Canada there were close parallels between the ecology of the farming frontier in Ontario and Saskatchewan and the states of North Dakota and Montana. But its expansion to the west was delayed by the physical barrier of the Canadian Shield. When it came it was promoted by Royal Governors who established a national police (the Royal Mounties) before mass immigration and who negotiated settlements with the Blackfoot tribes thus heading off the local violence and large-scale wars between whites and Native Americans that marred the history of the western U.S.
To an even greater extent the geography of Australia, dominated by a vast arid region in the center that created “a hinterland but no heartland”, relegated the bulk of the populations to the cities on the east and south coast. At the same time, royal land policy did not favor the small farmer in competition with the large sheep ranches. Still, even here there are a few regional similarities between the semi-arid fringes of Victoria province and California. And Australia also had its frontier folk hero in the form of a bushranger. Together with outlaws of the Old West he won a role in sentimental songs and ballads; “by taking to the bush the convict left England and entered Australia.”^[49]
The Northwest Frontier of India was the only zone of encounter between the British colonial expansion and a semi-nomadic population where the odds were rated even. In its general features this was a military frontier that more resembled those of the great ancient empires of Rome, Iran and China where a persistent threat to security existed over long periods. The British inherited the frontier problem from their predecessors the Moghuls who, like the founders of several Iranian and Chinese dynasties. were originally “eastern barbarians” before they arrived to settle in the fertile river valleys of India. Although the Northwest Frontier could hardly be said to have dominated British colonial policies, there was a constant tension between the proponents of a forward policy into Afghanistan in order to anchor the frontier on the Hindu Kush and the advocates of “masterly inactivity.” The British crossed the Afghan frontier in force three times between the 1940s and 1918 without settling much of anything.^[50] On a larger geopolitical scale the Northwest Frontier was one of the most celebrated arenas of the “Great Game” as the British called their rivalry with the Russians in Central Asia.^[51] It was a classic military frontier exhibiting sporadic warfare, trade, smuggling, the uncontrolled movement of peoples and it gave rise to a mythology of its own. In “Barrack Room Ballads” and the novel Kim Kipling created an immortal gallery of heroes and villains on both sides of the frontier.^[52] Today the Northwest Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan has lost nothing of its character except its glamour.
The long, porous and shifting frontiers of Imperial Russian and Chinese empires have also attracted comparativists who have employed Turner's these and its revisions as a point of departure in their analysis.^[53] However, even before Turner the nineteenth century Russian historians S. M. Solov'ev and V.O. Kliuchevskii followed in the early twentieth century by M. K. Liubavskii stressed the central role of colonization and frontiers in shaping the history of their own country.^[54] By contrast, though, their interpretations emphasized the negative effects: the draining of resources from the center, the unfavorable conditions of climate and soil, the threat of nomadic incursion. Historians in the early Soviet period added to this sober list the exploitation of conquered people, exemplified by M.N. Pokrovskii's well-known image of the empire as a “prison of nations.” A strong reversal set in only after World War II when the new state school of Soviet historians extolled the peasant colonizer as a heroic figure and employed the specialized term sblizhenie to signify the civilizing mission of the Russian people.^[55] A third turn has been taken only recently by the emerging regional (Siberian) school of historians who, in readjusting their focus to the specific features and values of societies on the periphery at odds with those of the center have nonetheless also acknowledged a debt to Turner.^[56]
Since the nineteen eighties a new generation of American specialists in Russian colonization have been incorporating fresh insights borrowed in part from revisionist American historians of the Western U.S. and in part from anthropology and cultural studies while mostly avoiding direct comparisons with the American experience. The emphasis has shifted from conquest and resistance on the frontier to cultural interaction, an interrogation of geographical visions, multiple locus and images of frontier utopias.^[57] From these studies it is clear that Russia's frontiers exhibited a variety of elements in different combinations that changed over periods of time. Andreas Kappeler in this volume has provided a useful functional sub-category of Russian frontiers: military, extractive and settlement.^[58] In certain regions state-sponsored systematic advance of frontiers as into the western borderlands preceded the spontaneous movement of peoples; in other areas like Siberia the reverse was true. To the south there was a combination of both. In areas like the Caucasus and Central Asia peasant colonists from the center played a minor role in comparison with the Cossacks and the army. The Caucasus frontier became enshrined in a heroic mythology that embraced figures on both sides.^[59] There was nothing romantic about the Russian frontier with the Poles. The multiplicity and cultural variety of frontier encounters had a profound affect on imperial institutions and the peculiar formation of a Russian national consciousness. In the nineteenth century Russian nationalistic publicists began to draw a series of inner frontiers in order to designate the truly Russian lands (that included the old Muscovy core, Belarus and the left bank Ukraine) from the rest of the empire.^[60] One of the most remarkable ideological reversals of the early Bolsheviks was to turn away from a revolution without frontiers to one that settled for the approximate boundaries of the old empire.
On the Chinese side, the pioneering figure in frontier studies was Owen Lattimore. His earliest work combined the keen first hand observations of a linguistically gifted, experienced traveler with historical and anthropological perspectives.^[61] Studded with comparative insights (the Roman Empire, the American West and the Northwest Frontier Province) its central thesis was to establish that frontiers as distinct from boundaries were the margins of socio-economic systems defined by their “optimal limit of growth.” While admitting that Turner was an acute observer, Lattimore added: “what he saw so clearly he saw standing on his head. In large measure, when he thought he saw what the frontier had done to society, he was really seeing what society did to the frontier.”^[62]
The advance of Chinese settlements into the frontier regions like Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and the northwest (Manchuria) was a relatively late phenomenon. Up until the mid to late nineteenth century the Qing (Manchu) dynasty was determined to preserve the frontier warrior traditions of their homeland and that of their allies the Mongols. But their attempt to prevent their tribal lands from being swamped by Chinese (Han) slowed but could not check the migratory pressure from the south. The small convict population was swelled by woodsmen, goldminers, ginseng diggers, pearl fishers, brigands and finally illegal peasant settlers. By the early twentieth century the Chinese greatly outnumbered the Manchus.^[63] A similar change was taking place in Inner Mongolia. In both frontier regions the “New Administration” of the post-Boxer Rebellion era sought to protect the border against foreign, mainly Russian intervention by developing the economy and opening grazing lands to Chinese settlement.^[64]In Xinjiang a small minority of Chinese concentrated in the cities was able to rule the province by playing off the other ethnic groups against one another.^[65] But the sinicization of the three frontier provinces occurred against a backdrop of decline in the power of the central government. With the collapse of the dynasty in 1911 the local warlords promoted autonomy in the frontier provinces. Deprived of its northern buffer China was vulnerable to the interventions of Japan and the Soviet Union losing Manchuria to the former and Outer Mongolia to the latter. In the late twentieth century Beijing has pursued sinicization of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang with systematic intensity.
To return to the problem of boundary maintenance as an ambiguous process, it should be clear from this survey, however brief and sketchy, that throughout history attempts by states to ensure stability and security by drawing boundary lines, erecting barriers, building walls and stigmatizing “the other” beyond the pale of civilization has produced mixed, on balance probably negative results. Even boundaries along “natural “ frontiers like the Rhine, the Alps or the Gobi Desert have created frontier zones where people, goods and ideas whether permitted or not cross over the line. Frontiers, frontiers men and women are celebrated, not surveyors. Attempts to keep out “the barbarians” have achieved only temporary results. Definitions of the barbarians have also failed to stand up especially when the barbarians inherit the state. Other symbolic geographies have had their moment of stigmatizing peoples, regions and continents. But most of these have come under such fierce attack in recent times that a reverse process of stigmatizing the stigmatizers has become fashionable.
The great hope of the white West in the 19th century to demarcate the world began to fade almost as soon as it triumph was celebrated at Versailles. A century of revolution, war and de-colonization and mass migration has overthrown boundaries everywhere and created new more dangerous frontiers within and around failed empires and failed states. It would seem at first glance that Europe is the exception. By dismantling internal boundaries it has sought greater stability and security. But ironically, at the same time its outer frontiers have become more ill-defined and porous, raising fresh fears of “barbarians” within the gates. Frontiers will continue to exercise their fascination as a place of cultural interaction, a process of social change and a symbol of challenge to human aspirations. The question remains open whether the place, process and symbol will become for those who inhabit and interpret them sites of peaceful exchange or violent conflict.