ABSTRACT
Shifting frontiers marked the edges of civilisation. Frontiers could expand as part of the mission to order the world as a whole, just as barbarians could convert. This chapter moves back and forth between ideas and lived experience, in settings such as the Roman and Chinese frontiers. It explores the mix of universal message, tolerance, and complacency that made up this view of the world, as well as the ‘second-order universalism’ in which outsiders can be incorporated, but only on the terms of the centre.
