The edge of the plain : how borders make and break our world

The edge of the plain How borders make and break our world

James Crawford

Book - 2023

"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 cr...ossings 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"--

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Subjects
Borderlands.
Boundaries.
Geopolitics.
Published
New York : W.W. Norton and Company 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
James Crawford (author)
Edition
First American edition
Item Description
"First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd. "--Title page verso.
Physical Description
422 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 385-412) and index.
ISBN
9781324037040
  • Introduction
  • Prologue: The edge of the plain
  • Part one: Making. Line of bones
  • The endless margin
  • Limitless
  • Part two: Moving. Walled off
  • The lost border
  • Part three: Crossing. Hostile terrain
  • Border burning
  • Part four: Breaking. The melting border
  • 'This wall of flesh'
  • A green line across a great shore.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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."(Jan.) 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.

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Review by Library Journal Review

From bloody territorial disputes in ancient Greece and the modern-day Middle East, from the Mason-Dixon Line to the many boundaries crossed daily by refugees to the "Great Green Wall" envisioned in Africa to battle desertification, borders really, really matter. Historian and BBC One documentarian Crawford considers how they have shaped history.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Scottish historian and documentarian Crawford looks at the meaning of borders and the power they hold. Borders are marked by walls, fences, barbed wire, and armed guards. In some places, they're less martial, as with a "three-country cairn" that marks the junction of Sweden, Norway, and Finland but is buried in snow for much of the year. In other places, borders may not be well marked but can have consequences for the person who crosses them willfully or even in error. In a provocative section of his narrative, Crawford considers the fate of the Alpine "iceman" called Ötzi, who was murdered as he hunted in the mountains, perhaps because he crossed a line that he shouldn't have. As one archaeologist remarked about certain "cult sites" found in the interceding valleys, "I think these places are markers for territory. If you came from the north, you'd see these places and they show you, that is my territory, or the territory of my community." Today, of course, the borders extend to the highest peaks, with markers made meaningless at times due to geological upheaval and melting glaciers. Crawford travels widely to make his points in a text reminiscent of those of Barry Lopez or Robert Macfarlane. One fruitful stop finds him at the Roman walls built at the orders of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, walls that lie far south of the great Roman victory over the Caledonians at the Battle of Mons Graupius. Why did the Romans give up so much territory when it appeared it was theirs to be had? "The end of the world had been reached, grasped and let go," writes the author, with no apparent explanation at hand. With the increasingly destructive effects of climate change, borders continue to collapse as island countries are disappearing under the waves and refugees flee their devastated homelands, lending Crawford's musings added timeliness. A thoughtful consideration of the imaginary lines that hold meaning for so many. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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