Fences and Neighbours

Drawing lines around the perimeter of one’s property, or one’s country’s territory, has always been a parlous process. Indeed, the earliest written treaties we possess, some from more than 4,000 years ago, were often about settling border disputes between ancient eastern empires. Plus, as a former practising lawyer, I know that some of the bitterest battles in contemporary society have been waged between neighbours fighting over small slivers of property on the edges of adjacent parcels of land. Humans are territorial and have therefore always struggled to define—precisely—the limits and attributes of their borders. Consequently, borders are, and always have been, fraught and emotional places.

Historians have long been fascinated by “frontiers,” “borderlands” and contested terrains of all kinds, but recent debates among historians have tended to blur whatever analytical significance terms such as “frontiers” and “borderlands” once had. Part of the problem is that...