Over the Borderline? Rethinking Territoriality at the Margins of Empire and Nation in the Modern Middle East (Part I)

Abstract

AbstractThis is the first of two connected articles examining the evolution of historical scholarship on borderlands within the field of Middle East studies. In both articles, I pay particular attention to how historians have addressed the relationship between borderland identities and modern territorializing empires and nation–states. I argue throughout both that analyzing what I call the “lived experience of territoriality” in borderland regions ought to take precedence over approaches that presume the ultimate imposition of fixed nation–state boundaries by the mid‐20th century. The adoption of borderlands as an analytical category along these lines presents an exciting opportunity for future research in modern Middle Eastern history precisely for its malleability. Historians who take a conceptually nuanced approach to borderlands and relate their work to new scholarship on territoriality will be able to explore a range of ways to understand local as well as state experiences and practices of power and politics, sovereignty and authority, and identity and belonging. In Part I, I begin by providing a general overview of key terminology that is prevalent across interdisciplinary scholarship on borderlands, before laying out my own framework for conceptualizing the relationship between borderland identities and modern discourses and practices of territoriality. I end this first installment by tracing the emergence of scholarship on Middle East borderlands within Ottoman historiography, focusing on one key work that pointed in important new directions for historians seeking to examine social and political life in the margins of modern Middle Eastern empires and nation–states.