The Defining Nature of the Imperial Frontier

If you’ve never visited, you may be inclined to think of China’s Great Wall as a singular installation, as a very great wall, as perhaps the greatest of walls. In fact, the so-called “Great Wall of China” is a series of walls and fortifications built over centuries as the Chinese empire expanded northward. Walls were built for protection from marauding nomads outside of the empire, but new structures were extended northward and westward as the empire expanded. Grand as they were (and are), the walls did not demarcate the limit of the empire; instead, they ratcheted the empire ever further outward. “Build and move on was the principle,” historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper observe about these walls, “not setting up a fixed border for all time.” Protection was one function of the wall to be sure, but “the wall” was never intended strictly to demarcate the empire from non-empire. Rather, in their successive geographical march, the walls offered the ongoing contact with the outsider, non-imperial subjects–-“barbarians,” if you will--that is the hallmark of imperial frontiers.

Frontiers, it turns out, are not really barriers at all. Rather they are spaces, conceptual as much as geographical, where the imperial and the non-imperial confront each other in dynamic admixture. Frontiers may be the place where imperial civilization encounters savage barbarism, but as Turner noted, that contact produced a dialectic out of which something new was produced. These interactions were cultural and technological and commercial, and as Burbank and Cooper point out, also political and military. The empire learns not only about the outside world at the frontier, but also about itself. Frontier meetings are undoubtedly asymmetrical–-both sides almost certainly do not hold equal power–-but they are places of meeting where mutual influence occurs in both directions.
 
The great historian Richard White studied the frontiers where 17th and 18th century British, British American, French, and Native American peoples met. He called these places “the middle ground,” a place of meeting, a zone of interaction, where “diverse peoples adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunderstandings.” From these misunderstandings “arise new meanings and through them new practices--the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.” (x).
 
Frontiers, in other words, are neither borders nor boundaries, places where influence and action are stopped. Instead, frontiers are much more like membranes, places where some interactions are blocked but others allowed to pass. It is these selections that define the character and identity of the empire itself. Through the frontier membrane passes influence, knowledge, ideas, and, yes, often violence. Coming the other way, the empire also allows knowledge to pass back to the metropole, as well as select ideas and practices. In the era of which White writes, a period of weak imperial presence at the frontier, the capacity of the European empires to control these filtering processes was limited. By the 19th and 20th century, British and American empires, with their mighty knowledge centers and their vast propaganda capacities, practiced a much more robust discrimination.
 
Thinking about frontiers as membranes is useful because it helps us see the two very different, even contrasting, processes that occur on either side of the frontier, and why empires are still so often misunderstood in our day. Beyond the frontier, the empire is clearly a force of revision. It seeks to alter the status quo, certainly politically and economically, and therefore also culturally and ideologically. Guided by imperial ideology, empires can be, and usually are, ruthless in their pursuits of regional (or perhaps global, depending on an empire’s reach and worldview) transformation.
 
Inside the frontier, in sharp contrast, the empire is obliged to deliver on its promises of order. Outside all may be revisionary violence, but inside all is (intended to be) tranquility. Hence frontiers are often arenas of violence, as the insidious outside is kept at bay while the structures of order--institutions, processes, structures, expectations--are problematically established. Empires, in short, are both agents of revision and agents of order, and the filtering processes at the frontier demarcate and define the limits of those processes. It is this filtering that accounts, in part, for the knowledge interruptions that occur between the metropole and the frontier-lands: Because metropolitan citizens are shielded from events beyond the frontier, the realities of imperial violence are often not seen, and certainly hard to believe, for imperial citizens invested in and benefitting from domestic imperial stability. It is why many Brits can enjoy a good curry in London and yet remain ignorant of the history of British violence in India. Americans’ lack of knowledge about the outside world, even as they enjoy the commercial fruits of contact with that world, are legendary. Imperial citizens, in their ignorance of imperial operations outside, may be knowledge-victims (at least of a sort) of the same frontier membrane that projects physical violence abroad even as it delivers copious amounts of certain kinds of knowledge back to the metropole.
 
Frontiers are membranes, and as such they allow some ideas and practices to pass and others not. Borders, on the other hand, are barriers. Borders reflect the surrender of the revisionary mission. Borders denote those places where the empire no longer wants to conduct its essential civilizing mission. The hardening of frontiers into borders signals the end, the furthest reach, of the empire. Think Hadrian’s Wall. Whatever effectiveness it maintained against recalcitrant Britannic barbarians, Hadrian's Wall certainly signaled that the Romans had had enough: enough transmission, enough reciprocity, enough convincing of divine mandates, enough expansion. It took some centuries more for the denouement to take place within Rome itself, but when the wall went up, the imperial light certainly went out.
 
One clear marker of the history of American empire, and of the sclerotizing of imperial energy, and the conversion of imperial energy to imperial fear, is the evolution of the southwest: once a frontier for the (often violent) imperial energies of a restless people, it is now being steadily converted into a border. I’ll leave it to my American readers to discern for themselves what the erection of borders and walls means for American imperial energies in lands that have historically been thought of as frontiers. It will also require further speculation to consider what it means that historically established northern borders are now, apparently, being considered as frontiers.
 
Frontiers are crucial components of empire. Frontiers secure the imperial citizenry, but they also articulate the imperial mission and define imperial culture. Future discussion will focus on evolving conceptions of the frontier, especially through the twentieth century as technology transformed how Americans think of spatial relations, security, and opportunity. We will also discuss stock American hero tropes, men and women of the frontier such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Sacagawea, and more, who were able to negotiate two worlds and produce out of that negotiation an imperial third way. Their folk celebrity is itself a celebration of American empire.
 
Further reading:
Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History (Princeton, 2010)
 
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991)