ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I offer a frontier perspective on East Asian development. By “frontier perspective,” I mean a focus on political, cultural, and economic interactions on the edges of the major states of the East Asian region, where they border each other, and where they abut on other regions of the globe. I have argued that East Asian frontiers, like regions or states, have common features that deserve comparative analysis (Perdue, forthcoming b). This view resolves some of the paradoxes of nationalist historiography, and complements the regionalist perspectives in this volume.
