The Edge of the Plain
How Borders Make and Break Our World
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
A wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an exploration of their role in shaping our world today.
Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next—a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform—borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe.
What happens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict how humans have always lived—and moved? Crawford confronts that question from bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia, to the Sápmi lands of Scandinavia, the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict, efforts to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border, and the dangerous border crossings pursued by migrants into Europe.
And yet the role of borders extends beyond specific sites of conflict. On the largest scale, borders define the limits of empire—the two walls in Britain that once represented the northwestern edge of the Roman Empire; the mythological eastern gate supposedly closed off by Alexander the Great; China’s virtual “Great Firewall.” On the smallest, human scale, cell walls are the last physical barrier against disease, after lines of quarantine have failed.
Finally, as The Edge of the Plain reveals, humans have not only made their mark on the landscape: the landscape itself is now changing, more and more rapidly due to climate change. Crawford introduces us to both the Alpine watershed—one such shifting, natural borderline—and the “Great Green Wall” in Africa, envisioned as an international, community-built bulwark against desertification.
Borders are as old as human civilization, and focal points for today’s colliding forces of nationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass migration. The Edge of the Plain illuminates these lines of separation past and present, how we define them—and how they define us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Crawford (Fallen Glory) offers an innovative and eclectic study of borders past, present, and future. Emphasizing the transience and fluidity of "physical and virtual" borders that divide people, nations, and landscapes, Crawford visits a national park along the U.S.-Mexico boundary; the city of Melilla, "a Spanish enclave... set into a peninsula of land in northeastern Morocco" that, along with its sister city Ceuta, form "the only land border between Africa and Europe"; the Green Line, which demarcated Israel and the Palestinian territories before the Six-Day War; and other locales. Throughout, he draws fascinating and original parallels between historical events, characterizing, for example, the carnage of trench warfare in the Somme during WWI as an inadvertent reenactment of the Battle of the Champions in ancient Greece. There are also rich analyses of the literature on borders (from Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis to Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing) and intriguing profiles of artists and activists including Carlos Spottorno, a Spanish photojournalist who documents the perilous journeys made by migrants traveling from the Middle East to Greece, and Hans Ragnar Mathisen, a "revolutionary" cartographer who put Sámi culture back on the Scandinavian map in the 1970s. Elsewhere, Crawford delves into climate change, mass migration, Covid-19, and other contemporary issues interwoven with borders, and offers evocative descriptions of Hadrian's Wall, the West Bank, the Ötztal Alps (in Austria and Italy), and more. This is a vital and eloquent reminder that borders control "our landscapes, our memories, our identities." Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly noted that this was the author's first book. It also misstated that the Battle of the Champions occurred in ancient Rome.
