Introduction

For the purposes of this collection, frontiers may be defined as unfinished spatial projects. Despite their potential as gateways to wealth and regeneration, borderlands seem to stubbornly escape human mastery. But they do so over long periods of time, and the overall impression is that frontiers eventually close. The essays presented here explore a period commonly referred to as modernity. Modernity means many things, but we could narrow it down to three historically and locally rooted developments: industrialization, nation-state building, and imperialism. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of the world industrial economy, the modern frontier was intellectually recognized. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about it in 1848 (n.p.): “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Modern capitalism goes hand in hand with the making of the nation-state, which is nothing if not a process of frontier making. In Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) Juan Domingo Sarmiento looked at the vast plains that lay beyond Buenos Aires and concluded, drawing from Johann Gottfried von Herder and James Fenimore Cooper in equal measure, that the Argentinian national character was the product of distance, solitude, and rugged gaucho (cowboy) livelihoods. Fueled by the profits and needs of industry, governments created new networks that reached beyond the nation-state. Imperialism was a long-distance form of border crossing that slowly turned the entire world into a gigantic space of uneven flows. Ideologically, nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism was justified on the grounds of sheer economic necessity and a moral obligation to civilize the innocent, barbarian hordes. It is worth recalling Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden (1899)—“Your new-caught, sullen peoples/Half-devil and half-child”—but for balance’s sake, let us quote from Mochiyi Rokusaburo, a member of the Japanese colonial administration in Taiwan, who in 1902 wrote:

The problem of aboriginal land has yet to arrive at a successful solution. Yet if we do not solve this problem, our countrymen will likely fail to realize their great potential for overseas expansion. Occupying 50 to 60 percent of the entire islands, the aboriginal lands constitute a treasure trove rich in forest, agricultural, and mining resources. Unfortunately, we have not succeeded in unlocking this treasure trove because ferocious savages block our access to it . . . it is not a problem that one can hope to resolve by ethical means.

(Rokusaburo quoted in Tierney 2010, 44)