Abstract
I compare and contrast two "southwestern"" frontiers: the southwestern United States. long northeast New Spain (short hand: New Mexico) and southwest China (short hand: Yunnan). Both have been. and even today remain. frontier zones. In the 2]51 century both are also important borderlands for two of the most important players in the modern world-system. the United States and China. They share a historical orientation to the areas outside of the two states into which they were ultimately incorporated. Both brought a great deal of new practices and ideas into the incorporating states. They serve to give deep historical backgrounds which put discussions of contemporary globalization in perspective. This comparison also makes clear that the concepts of nation-state and precise borders are typically modern and that setting precise borders is a continuing project. even while borderlands remain. like the frontiers that preceded them. frontier zones. These comparisons may also yield insights into world-system expansion and incorporation.
Highlights
In this paper I review some of the understandings of frontiers and borders in a deep historical and global perspective
I seek to enhance understanding of frontier processes, and to begin to sort out what is really new in the 21st century and what is a continuation of older processes, some of which may go back millennia (e.g., Hall and Fenelon 2008, 2009)
A key point here is that such frontiers cannot be explained solely from local processes and events
Summary
Of interest here is that incorporation is a process (or set of processes) that tends to create, modify, transfo1m, and/or eliminate frontiers (Hall 2009, 2012). The goal is to begin a process of delimiting empirically the range of variation of what is included as exemplars of the object of study This strategy is most useful when the statistical universe - here frontiers - is not well known, which is certainly the case for frontiers over the entire globe over many millennia. In a variance maximi zing strategy such issues as chronological time, consistency of regional area, types of geography, social structures of resident populations, and so on are, at best , of secondary interest To be sure, they should become central in later, more refined comparisons. While the historical times are nearly a century apart, cyclical phases are the same This is much more difficult in comparing frontiers, since often the cycles are not well known. It is for these reasons in this comparison that chronological time and length time considered are of secondary importance to variance max1m1zmg
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