Imperial Frontier Research Articles

The Canary Islands, an Imperial Frontier: Decolonial Thought in South-South Relations in Northwest Africa

ABSTRACT The Canary Islands have been denied their Africanness throughout history. This has served to legitimise the problematic role of the archipelago as West’s imperial frontier in Northwest Africa. Through agenealogy of the available literature on relations between the African continent and the Islands, the effects of this position are critically evaluated. To this purpose, this article presents a sociological analysis of the dialectic of North-South domination and its effects on the ambivalent representations that insist on the archipelago being referred to, in some cases, as the South of the North, and, in others, as the North of the South. From the point of view of decolonial thought, it is affirmed that the Canary Islands, despite its links with the Kingdom of Spain and European Union, can also recognise itself in the African political, cultural, and epistemic plurality and interact with it in the framework of South-South relations.

Subsistence strategies and climate change as key factors in the vicinity of the Great Wall in northern China from 500 BCE

Whether, and in what ways, the association between changes in climate and the shifting of imperial frontiers (i.e. the Great Wall) could be mediated by the social responses of major ethnic groups is a question that remains unanswered. Ulanqab is a region in Inner Mongolia associated with a long history of Great Wall construction from the Warring States to the Ming dynasties (~500 BCE–1644 CE) and the Great Wall is often regarded as the boundary of the Central Plains dynasty. This paper uses Ulanqab as a case study to investigate the historical inter-relationship between changes in climate and subsistence strategies on the one hand, and the positioning of the Great Wall on the other. We determined the precise geographical coordinates of the Great Wall in this region during each dynastic period of Chinese history, and compared its location to (1) the empire’s boundaries in each dynasty, (2) evidence that is available on climate change from high-resolution paleo-climate reconstructions and (3) subsistence strategies (whether agriculture, pastoralism, or nomadism) that people adopted as recorded in historical documents. Geo-referenced information from associated archaeological sites was also used to determine the extent of habitation in different areas. We found that during the period of agriculturalist empires (the Han and Ming dynasties), the Great Wall was a frontier between farming and animal husbandry, and was located to the south of the Daqing Mountains. In contrast, during the period of pastoralist empires (the Zhao Kingdom [of the Warring States], Northern Wei and Jurched Jin periods), the Great Wall was the frontier between animal husbandry and nomadism, and was located to the north of the Daqing Mountains. These mountains (42.5°N) seem to have been the northern limit of human settlements that were based on animal husbandry and farming. We observed that, when precipitation and temperature increased, this resulted in an augmentation of agricultural production that most likely facilitated the northward expansion of the agriculturalist peoples. A decrease in precipitation, on the other hand, resulted in the shrinkage of pastures and food, triggering a southward expansion that was characteristic of the pastoralist peoples. This study attempts to provide new insights into the interrelationships among changes in climate, human societies and geopolitics in Chinese history.

Black-necked crane as border object: interspecies politics in Himalayan borderlands

ABSTRACT Legacies of imperial frontier-making, ongoing border conflicts between nuclear armed nations, changing livelihoods, and the impact of anthropogenic climate change have created complicated claims on Himalayan borderland areas in the name of conservation, security, ethnic identity and development. Combining historical research with ethnography, this article traces the role of the Black-necked crane (grus nigricollis) in the formation of mid-nineteenth century imperial frontiers in the Himalayas and, subsequently, its present-day position in the political ecology of two Himalayan regions along the Sino-India border – Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. We introduce the concept of ‘border object’ and demonstrate how it can serve as a useful concept to understand how non-humans become participants in changing configurations of territoriality, biopolitics and science, which underpin both a past imperial frontier and present-day border regimes.

Ending slavery in imperial peripheries: Ottoman abolitionist policy in Trablusgarp and Benghazi provinces (1857–1911)

When Istanbul prohibited the trade of enslaved Africans in 1857, the Ottoman local authorities expanded efforts to curb human trafficking throughout the imperial realm. These endeavours also included Libya, which lies at the frontiers of the Greater Sahara, a major slave-raiding zone in the nineteenth century. The historiography devoted to modern Libya maintains that the Porte took action to curb slavery only in response to British pressure. In this article, I seek to situate the prohibition of human trade in Libya within the larger scope of the end of slavery in the imperial realm. I argue that the Ottomans conducted an abolitionist policy in Libya that was embedded in the reforms undertaken in these peripheral provinces, namely, to foster the Porte’s sovereignty at its imperial frontier. I further argue that the enslaved population gained agency in the manumission process and in their integration into Ottoman society after their liberation. This bottom-up approach to the end of human bondage reveals the entanglement of old and new patterns of manumission in the era of abolition as well as the social integration of these emancipated slaves into Ottoman society during the Reform period.

The Imperial Frontier in the Worldview of the Decembrists: F. N. Glinka—Romantic Christianity and Karelian Ethnography

The article delves into reconstructing the religious-philosophical worldview of the Decembrist Fyodor Nikolaevich Glinka, set against the backdrop of his frontier experiences during his exile in the Olonets province. His poems, “The Maiden of the Karelian Forests” and “Karelia, or the Captivity of Marfa Ivanovna Romanova,” created during his residency in Petrozavodsk, are compelling blends of the era’s literary trends, Glinka’s personal religious beliefs, and ethnographic portrayals of Karelia. Consequently, the Karelian frontier is viewed through the diverse prism of F. N. Glinka, a Russian officer, Decembrist, poet, and religious thinker, who bequeathed an extensive literary oeuvre. This research is aimed to undertake an exhaustive analysis of F. N. Glinka’s literary contributions as a Decembrist and to historically and philosophically interpret his worldview, particularly focusing on frontier themes. The study meticulously perused Glinka’s artistic pieces, ethnographic entries, religious-philosophical writings, and his epistolary body of work. Insights were gleaned on the various dimensions of his perspectives and artistic endeavors. This article may captivate those researching the history of the Karelian frontier, the artistic and philosophical imprints of the Decembrists, and scholars intrigued by the nuances of Russian public discourse in the 19th century.

Trends in the production of olive oil amphorae at ceramic workshops in Roman Baetica: a chrono-proportional representation method

During the first few centuries AD, Rome and the imperial frontiers were supplied with olive oil from the province of Hispania Baetica (southern Spain). Vast quantities of oil were exported in Dressel 20 amphorae. But how did the agricultural economy of Baetica relate to global demand and how did it change over time? The author focuses on relative changes in agricultural output, using a new method to model fluctuations in amphora production based on more than 1000 waster sherds collected from 23 amphora workshops in the Guadalquivir Valley. The chrono-proportional representation method indicates variation in production between individual workshops and wider production districts, contributing to assessments of the scale and organisation of the Roman economy.

The path towards sovereign territory: Reading China’s (anti)federal idea against its modern territorial constitutional imaginary

Abstract This article aims to shed light on how China has (re)imagined the geographical distribution of authority on its path towards modern statehood by unpacking the debate surrounding the constitutional status of Hong Kong in China’s territorial constitution. Challenging the conventional wisdom that China is constitutionally impervious to the federal idea, it makes a threefold argument. First, elements of federalism do exist in China, as intimated in its territorial constitution regarding Hong Kong, but have become nearly invisible as the relationship between mainland China and Hong Kong is traveling in the opposite direction. Second, the opposite development is attributable to the antifederal idea embedded in China’s modern constitutional imaginary, which has been shaped by its multifaceted experience with federalism in history. Under the antifederal idea, intimations of federalism in China’s territorial constitution are far from the bridge to a full-fledged Chinese federation, but only meant to be instrumental and transitional. Third, the antifederal idea reflects China’s modern territorial constitutional imaginary under which variegated imperial frontiers are reimagined as homogenized state territory. In conclusion, China’s encounter with Western legal concepts is formative of the Chinese modern constitutional imaginary and thus further influences its attitude towards federalism in framing the territorial constitution.

Sören Urbansky. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border.

Sören Urbansky’s title, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, is somewhat misleading, since the monograph’s subject is not the entire Sino-Russian border but a relatively small portion focused on the Argun river section and the communities of Manzhouli on the Chinese side and Zaibaikalsk on the Russian. Nevertheless, Urbansky’s work is a welcome addition to a growing list of recently published works on the history of the Sino-Russian encounter, such as Victor Zatsepine’s Beyond the Amur (2017) and Mark Gamsa’s Harbin: A Cross Cultural Biography (2020). Urbansky’s goal is a complete political, economic, and social history of the Argun region—a goal with mixed results. There are two primary themes in this monograph. The first is contact—personal, cultural, political, and economic—and the second is the gradual hardening of the border as these empires coalesce into two nation states with defined national identities and concerns about illicit economic, and as the book enters the twentieth century, ideological exchanges. It is the latter theme that is the monograph’s strength as the monograph progresses from loosely guarded imperial frontier to highly policed border.

“She looked ten years older”: Mechanisms of the new Woman's marriage and premature aging under patriarchy in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins

This article examines how the New Woman's premature aging happens in tandem with patriarchal marriage at the fin de siècle through a scrutiny of Sarah Grand's New Woman novel, The Heavenly Twins (1893/1992). The novel is a narrative of female degeneration, in which its three young and married New Woman characters become impuissant to realize the cumbersome feminized ideals of national regeneration and age or die prematurely in their twenties. Their premature decline is caused by moral and sexual degeneration of their military husbands who practice the ideology of progress at the imperial frontier. In the article, I explain how the patriarchal culture of the late Victorian society expedites women's aging process in marriage. The symptoms of mental and physical sickness experienced by the novel's Victorian wives in their twenties are a product not merely of excruciating syphilis but also the patriarchal culture. I ultimately contend that Grand unveils the other side of the male-oriented ideology of progress in criticizing the late Victorian reality where there is negligible scope for the New Woman's vision of female-led regeneration.

The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962

At a moment when India and China are clashing over their borders once again, this book is a timely examination of the “scientific” practices deployed by the British colonial state in India through the course of the long nineteenth century to bring those borders into existence. In particular, it details the mapping of the region of the northwestern Himalayas, with Ladakh at its center, that led to its transformation from a crossroads of economic, political, and cultural exchange to an imperial frontier to be policed and enforced. The book argues that imperial attempts at mapping the region and demarcating borderlines within it were only partially successful, leaving behind a colonial legacy that the postcolonial states inherited and continue to wrestle with. Not only has this legacy embittered relations between the two neighbors, but perhaps most poignantly, it has rendered the once-prosperous entrepôt of Ladakh into “a fractured and disputed borderland” (3).The most interesting aspect of this book is its discussion of the emergence of the sciences of governance and geopolitics in the context of border-making practices. The colonial state's utilization of the tools provided by the emergent discipline of geography to transform indigenous notions of space into territory that could be physically rendered on a map was preceded and accompanied by numerous attempts to survey and collect information about these spaces. This, in turn, generated a slew of manuals, such as gazetteers, which presented this information about the newly mapped territories in great detail and served as tools to more effectively govern and control them. As intelligence-gathering on the frontiers intensified and more resources were expended on it, so did the desire to regulate the border itself, through road-building and other such activities. These interrelated projects gave rise to geopolitics, a new way of thinking that combined geographical information with territory and security. Knowledge of rivers, mountains, watersheds, and other such natural resources was rendered critical to the formation and maintenance of states, particularly on their frontiers.The irony of this geopolitical project, the book demonstrates, was that it failed in the very laboratory that was crucial to its birth—the northwestern Himalayas—where it was unable to draw a single line through the Aksai Chin that would demarcate a clear border between India and China. This was not from lack of trying, and the story of the repeated attempts to do so forms a large part of the book. The individuals involved in this project—besides the British surveyors, cartographers, adventurers, and spies—were the “trans-frontier men,” as the book refers to them. These men regularly traversed the emergent frontier and included highly skilled Indian pundits who drew on indigenous knowledge to assist in surveying and mapping, as well as Yarkandi and Ladakhi officials, traders, and pony drivers, among others. It is here that the book misses an opportunity to give readers a more textured sense of these individuals themselves, their life histories, and how they navigated the new political landscape while shaping the emergent science of geopolitics.The most significant victim of this project of imperial boundary-making and its postcolonial legacies, the book illustrates well, has been Ladakh, which was a part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir during the colonial period, then became a part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in independent India, and since 2019 has been a union territory ruled directly by the Indian central government. While on the one hand it has been caught up in two geostrategic conflicts—the struggle between China and India on their borders as well as the dispute between India and Pakistan over the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir—on the other, it has come to occupy an increasingly ambiguous and marginalized position within the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and India as a whole. As the book demonstrates, ever since Ladakh was territorialized and its territory became central to the imperial frontier and later the border of the nation state, its inhabitants have been rendered into not much more than peripheral actors to be surveilled and controlled in the name of imperial and national security.The Frontier Complex is an engaging account of the confluence of geographical knowledge, definitions of territory, and ideas of security in the creation and maintenance of imperial borders in the nineteenth century, which have had profound implications for the relationships among states into the twenty-first century. It is thus a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the antecedents of these relationships and what continues to drive them at the contemporary moment.

Chinese Tofu in Cold War Taiwan: Gendered Cosmopolitanism and Contested Chineseness

ABSTRACT Chinese Tofu (1971), edited by the acclaimed female writer Lin Haiyin in Taiwan, came out in a rapidly changing Cold War order in East Asia. Focusing on this previously neglected work, this article offers a close reading of how a mundane foodstuff shed light on contested Chineseness, one informed by Lin’s own gendered experience in the diaspora. Rather than reifying or essentializing “Chinese” foodways, tofu opened up the possibility of a more cosmopolitan geography. That geography pointed to former imperial frontiers, the Sinitic cultural sphere, and beyond. The book’s afterlife in reform-era China underscores the ongoing debate over what it means to be Chinese.

A Needle in a Haystack: Looking for an Early Modern Peasant Who Travelled from Spain to America

Seventeenth-century travel accounts written by ordinary people are a rarity. In this article, we analyze the unusual travel report by Gregorio de Robles, a Castilian peasant (labrador) who travelled several European empires in Western Europe and America at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The approach we offer is that of a global microhistory. The aim of this article is mainly methodological: we try to delineate the methodological steps we had to undertake to trace Robles in the sources. Looking for an early modern peasant traveler is comparable to searching for a needle in a haystack, but we argue that this endeavor is worthwhile because Robles offers a unique perspective on how ordinary people traveled in early modern times and on imperial frontier zones. We show that his convivial ties and the places he mentions were key elements in the methodology.

Imagining imperial frontiers: Photography-as-cartography in the mapping of eastern Africa

This paper examines the construction of imperial landscapes in the borderlands of eastern Africa in the early twentieth century. Recent literature has emphasized the haphazard, contingent, and often hybrid nature of mapping imperial frontiers and colonial governance in eastern Africa. This paper looks at the role of photography in the mapping of the Kenya-Somali frontier through the rich photographic archive of colonial official, Sir Geoffrey Archer. Archer documented his cartographic surveys through multiple media – diaries, maps, photographs – that provide a unique lens through which to explore the role of visual culture in contestations over territoriality, mobility, and sovereignty. While this photographic archive visualized imperial frontier landscapes and documented the work of cartographic surveys, it also revealed the dependency on local intermediaries, through their labour, geographic knowledge, and spatial practices. Photography-as-cartography demonstrated both the productive work of photography and the ambivalent presence of colonized peoples in the mapping of imperial frontiers, revealing the social lives of the borderlands and capturing fugitive meanings, bodies, and landscapes.

Imperial Frontier in the World Outlook of the Decembrists. A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky: a Romantic Historiosophy and Expansion into the Caucasus

The historiography of Russian expansion into the Caucasus is very extensive and continues to be replenished with new research, since this topic will hardly ever be exhausted and interest in it is unlikely to dwindle. The same can be said about the Decembrist uprising and the subsequent fate of those rebels who were sent into exile to various parts of the Russian Empire. The frontier theory makes it possible to link these two topics both by taking a fresh look at some of the most well-known subjects in Russian history and opening up new lines of research in traditional frontier studies. The purpose of this study was to conduct a historical and philosophical analysis of the literary heritage of the Decembrist A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky in order to reconstruct his worldview through the lense of frontierism. A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s literary pieces, philosophical theses, military notes and personal letters were analyzed in connection with his existential experience of the Caucasian War and historical events to which he bore witness. Conclusions are drawn, regarding various aspects of his worldviews, some of which remained unshakable, whereas others were transformed under the influence of the frontier. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this article may be of interest to the historians who study both Russian development of the Caucasus and Russian social thought of the 19th century.

20th Century Western Visayan Millenarian Representations: The Case of “Emperor” Flor Intrencherado in the Local Press, 1925-1929

20th Century Western Visayan Millenarian Representations: The Case of “Emperor” Flor Intrencherado in the Local Press, 1925-1929

Land Reform, Henry Rider Haggard, and the Politics of Imperial Settlement, 1900–1920

AbstractThis article considers the links between land reform and emigration through the figure of Henry Rider Haggard and argues that these two issues were deeply intertwined within British politics. Land reform in Britain is often considered as a domestic issue, but imperial campaigners often presented this in terms of the British empire. Haggard campaigned for twenty years for a greater living link to the land in Britain and the empire and believed that this link had profound effects upon English patriotism, character, and health. The imperial frontier had a spirit that improved English character, an idea that Haggard developed in the 1870s and is evident in much of his fiction. Imperial emigration was presented as a patriotic act that aided imperial defence in Australia from Chinese expansion and in South Africa from indigenous opposition. Population was the only way to bolster and defend the empire. Considering his books, speeches, newspaper reviews, and his work for the Royal Colonial Institute, this article argues that British politics and the land between 1900 and 1920 should be considered in an imperial frame. Existing work has neglected the imperial aspect of land reform, and how it was presented by emigration societies, which many imperialists considered an obvious way of dealing with unemployment and increasing urbanization whilst bolstering Greater Britain.

To Reveal the Caucasus Cultures of XIX Century: Orientalism in Russian Caucasus War Period Travelogues

The paper is concerned with the issue of textual visualisation of Caucasus in Russian travelogues performed in 1820-1830th – the decades of the Caucasus War escalation. Taken as example entries from the travelogues of I.T. Radojitsky and V.B. Bronevsky published in Russian Empire in early XIX c., the authors show deep connections of the outlook on the region and people inhabited it with the foundation of the Orientalism as an approach to describing native people of the Imperial frontier.The research underlines the importance of scrutinised study of travellers experience they endured on voyages by the Caucasus in deep connection with the political course on “pacifying” the region, proclaimed by the Imperial authorities. Racy images of the Cossacks, Russian settlers, native peoples and “unpacified” highlanders were performed in order to legislate the Imperial annexation of lands and their acquisition by Russian civilisation. Together with the motives of showing huge contrast between the pastoral life of Russian peasants and towns dwellers with the backwardness of the natives, matched the common ideas of European colonialism, the authors show public awareness of the “unpacified” highlanders expressed by the travellers in the image of “a Circassian”. We traced features of Russian literature Romanticism in the travellers depicture of a Highlander as a “noble savage” did for a living by robs and plunders. The authors came to the conclusions that images, elaborated by Russian travellers and righters were utter vivid and influenced on the perception of the region by Russian layman until the early XX c.The paper is concerned with the issue of textual visualisation of Caucasus in Russian travelogues performed in 1820-1830-th. – the decades of the Caucasus War escalation. Taken as example entries from the travelogues of I.T. Radojitsky and V.B. Bronevsky published in Russian Empire in early XIX c., the authors show deep connections of the outlook on the region and people inhabited it with the foundation of the Orientalism as an approach to describing native people of the Imperial frontier. The research underlines the importance of scrutinised study of travellers experience they endured on voyages by the Caucasus in deep connection with the political course on “pacifying” the region, proclaimed by the Imperial authorities. Racy images of the Cossacks, Russian settlers, native peoples and “unpacified” highlanders were performed in order to legislate the Imperial annexation of lands and their acquisition by Russian civilisation. Together with the motives of showing huge contrast between the pastoral life of Russian peasants and towns dwellers with the backwardness of the natives, matched the common ideas of European colonialism, the authors show public awareness of the “unpacified” highlanders expressed by the travellers in the image of “a Circassian”. We traced features of Russian literature Romanticism in the travellers depicture of a Highlander as a “noble savage” did for a living by robs and plunders. The authors came to the conclusions that images, elaborated by Russian travellers and righters were utter vivid and influenced on the perception of the region by Russian layman until the early XX c.

Funerary expressions on imperial frontiers: Burial caves south of the Yangzi River (2nd to 3rd century CE)

This paper documents a previously uncharted area of the Han Empire Southwest frontier, where it identifies an overlooked type of burials in artificial caves dating to the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Until now, this specific funerary tradition located south of the Yangzi river (Changjiang 長江) has been presented as a local effect of the centralized phenomenon of “Han tombs”. As a result, its peculiarities were ascribed to logistical constraints in technology, material and terrain. This research, instead, argues that the man-made caves south of the Yangzi correspond to a distinctive tradition of placing the dead emerging in the last decades of the Eastern Han dynasty.The crucial point made by this research concerns the location of the burial type, which appears to systematically be distribution along secondary fluvial routes. Despite their absence in written history, minor tributaries of the Yangzi river potentially played an important role in interregional communication and trade, in a context of weakened imperial rule. Resting on a field report of two major southern tributaries of the Yangzi – the Chishui and Wu rivers, and a case study of the Qi river, a minor tributary of the Yangzi and an area of concentration of the atypical rock-cut cemeteries, a situational definition for the identity of the cave builders is proposed, in the backstage of imperial presence.Direct field survey conducted by the author in the years 2013–2016 in 63 clusters of burial caves and the compilation of data gathered by other researchers for 562 groups of burial caves and 579 individual burial caves within these groups, shows that, far from being peripheral, the alternative burial type was practiced along a 500 km long section of the upper Yangzi river. This paper highlights the typological and iconographical consistency of the alternative funerary tradition south of the Yangzi river, blooming at the end of the Han dynasty, as compared to cemeteries in the Sichuan basin and the Yangzi gorges.

Cartographic Ethnography: Missionary Maps of an Eighteenth-Century Spanish Imperial Frontier

ABSTRACT The maps of a Spanish imperial frontier in the Philippines made in the eighteenth-century by the missionary Alejandro Cacho reflect an ethnographic approach that simultaneously reified and undermined Spanish notions of conquest and civilization. While Cacho celebrated mission towns and denigrated unsubjugated settlements, several elements of his maps subverted that message by recognizing the presence of animist communities and the different mobilities taking place at the frontier. The apparent conflict of messages is explained by the context in which the maps were made.

Formation of New Life Strategies of the Nomadic Kazakhs the Imperial Frontier of the 19th — Early 20th Century

The article will analyze the process of the formation of new, different from traditional, life strategies of Kazakh nomads of the imperial frontier zone of the 19th — early 20th centuries based on the analysis of various sources, as well as works and studies devoted to characterizing the specifics of the existence of nomadic forms of management. We studied materials 175 of the Fund of the State Archive of the Orenburg Region, as well as Temporary Provisions on Management in the Steppe Regions of the Orenburg and West Siberian Governor-Generals and Materials on Kyrgyz Land Use published from 1896 to 1915. In addition, certain works of Kazakh literature were drawn, which are unique historical sources. The article is based on the analysis of various historical sources, as well as works and studies devoted to the characteristics of the existence of nomadic forms of management and formation the new types of life strategy. A critical approach to various historical sources allowed us to compare the diverse factual material, reconstruct the transformation, and change in the self-awareness of yesterday's nomads Nomads maximally inscribed in nature and the surrounding landscape retained their identity through the realization of a pastoral way of life and mentality. The gradual, ever more active manifestation of the new logic of development proposed by the Russian Empire, which is alien to nomads, made the Kazakhs develop new mechanisms for survival and self-realization in the proposed circumstances, adapting to them as much as possible. The Kazakh elite of the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries tried to give answers to the classical questions of the intelligentsia: who is to blame and what to do? It was necessary to determine in the further perspective of life: to preserve nomadism, to seek other substitute forms of semi-nomadic forms, or gradually to move to a sedentary life. The specificity of the frontier territory was manifested in the fact that nomadic Kazakhs were actively involved in the process of transforming everyday life and, in order to protect their lands from increasing competition of peasants, learned to rely not only on their own resources, but also to find support in local authorities.