The Significance of the Frontier in World History

Abstract

AbstractTake a walk down the streets of any town in the western United States and you will see the legacy of a frontier: not the exceptional frontier of American mythology, but a fragment of the global frontier of European expansion over the last five hundred years. European weeds on the sidewalks, Eurasian microbes in Caucasian bodies, crosses on the church and in the cemetery, and Old World crops growing in the fields outside of town, all provide evidence of the modern expansion of European power. Now fly to Yunnan in China and see Muslim farmers harvesting Southeast Asian crops and worshiping in mosques that look like Chinese temples. These examples reveal that one of the most prominent facets of world history is the expansion and interchange of cultural and biological traditions that give rise to “frontier zones” of cultural interchange, accommodation, and conquest. Often fragmented by modern national borders, these frontier zones represent one of the major areas of global change. Despite the ubiquity of such zones, there exist few clear standards for defining frontiers or for studying them. Using a combination of scholarship from the study of the American West and some comparative examples from other world frontiers, a few observations can be made.