New Books In Geography

Intrinsic to the practice of empire is the creation of boundaries. We tend to think of such boundaries as borders, physical lines of demarcation past which the empire’s sovereignty has no purchase. But, in fact, the picture is much fuzzier than that. A foundational task of empire is to define, to categorize, and in so doing, to make peoples and places knowable; only once something is known can it be controlled. For this reason, the peoples that stalk the edges of empire have been a constant source of anxiety. These peoples, defying the state’s power of comprehension and inhabiting the very limits of its reach, are the empire’s frontier. In Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Harvard University Press, 2020), Dr. Benjamin D. Hopkins makes the case that such peoples and the practices used to control them constitute “frontier governmentality.” In Hopkins’ formulation, the frontier is not a place, but rather a practice. Frontiers are an ideational space in which emp