This is a great book, beautifully written, taking a long view of borders and territoriality. They have always been with us, but in different forms, leaving traces which persist. All borders are also stories.
It is suggested Paleolithic cave art marked that this was “our” place. Aboriginal Huner-gatherers buried bodies at the edge of tribal grounds.
The corpse now known as Otzi, dating from 5,300 years Before Present from the Copper Age was found preserved in a melting glacier on what is now the Italian/Austrian border indicating that men were crossing the high Alps, so it wasn’t a barrier to movement at this time as had been thought. He had been shot with an arrow through the shoulder and then finished off with a blow to the head. This didn’t appear to be robbery, as his valuables weren’t taken. Had he crossed some ancient border?
The Sami followed the migration patterns of the reindeer. In winter in the lowland forest they dig into the snow for lichen. In spring, when their calves are born, they seek pastures where the snow melts early, in summer they retreat to the mountains to escape the heat and mosquitos. The Sami were a people without a country, who have continued this lifestyle since pre-history. However such transhumance was restricted by national frontiers. Herders didn’t want ownership, they wanted user rights. The same applies to coastal fishermen. Things change, the Sami were downtrodden, being Sami is now chic. With global warming, the winters are less stable than they were, with sudden freezes and sudden thaws, the snow gets harder preventing the reindeer from digging for lichen. Herding is now done with snow mobiles, even helicopters.
The earliest written record of a border was in cuneiform, between two Mesopotamian city states, each with its protective deities and heroes. It records a border crossed, the city sacked and “beloved fields” on “the edge of the plain” seized.
Greek polis comprised the asty, urban centre, and chora, agricultural hinterland. Borders were liminal spaces, edgelands, eschatia. Piles of stones or columns of wood were placed there representing the Gods marking the edge of the Polis. These were developed into Herms, stone columns with a head and male genitals. In Athens adolescents, ephebes, occupied the border forts walking the land before, after 2 years, becoming hoplites. A similar, but more brutalizing, process was undertaken in Sparta. Both emphasise the link between borders and the transition to manhood. Beyond the male-controlled Polis was the wilderness, where female followers of Dionysus followed frenzied rituals, described in Euripides’s tragedy, the Bachae. This was the eremos chora, no man’s land, a description adopted in WWI for the wasteland between opposing trenches. As the Greek population increased, settlement expanded into the wilderness. The polis came to adjoin each other with stones marking the boundary.
The Romans viewed themselves as having domain without limits, expanding into what they considered barbarian lands in borders of unequals. This was repeated In Turner’s ever onward Frontier in the United States, the founding fathers classically educated. The east-west border between Delaware and Pennsylvania was drawn through the wilderness by two British surveyors, establishing in the Mason -Dixon Line, the principle of continuing straight line interstate boundaries. The British forbad settlement beyond the Alleghenies in 1775. The American Revolution was in part therefore a war against borders. In the 19th century the Mason -Dixon Line became the divide between slave and free States.
In the Middle Ages there were non coincident and overlapping territories. Sovereign nations are viewed as dating from the Treaty of Westphalia, which in 1648 ended the Thirty Years War. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht, setting the border between France and Savoy, was apparently the first following a watershed. In 1919 under the Treaty of St Germain the frontier between Italy and Austria was set along the watershed, Süd Tirol passing to Italy, its Italian place names largely the creations of an Italian nationalist. With recent glacial melt, adjustments had been made to existing watershed borders. From 2005 it was agreed between Italy and Austria that as the glaciers melt further the border would move to the new watershed.
In Israel the 310 km Green Line marked the line of the 1948 ceasefire. It was never intended to be a border. The line between Israel and Palestine has drifted away from the Green Line and now runs for700km taking in Jewish settlements and creating the Palestinian Archipelago.
Throughout borders are described as art forms, Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel on the West Bank, an hotel/ art installation on the Green Line, the Graffiti on the western side of the Berlin Wall contrasted with the bare walls on the East German side, clearly a metaphor.
There is a sharp line in West Africa between the Savannah/ Sahel and the forest, but not between the Sahel and Sahara, which has been advancing, as a result of deforestation and monocultural farming, the move away from traditional farming leading to conflicts between farmers and pastoralists, A continuous forest running across national boundaries was planned as long ago as the 1930s to halt the advance of the Sahara, not a line in the sand but a line against the sand. This vast shelter belt was never planted. Instead in Niger the land had been rehabilitated by smallholders bringing back a green mosaic of agro-forestry parkland.
Crawford notes that many restrictions on travel had the aim of restricting the spread of infectious diseases. He sees Lockdown as exposing wealthy Westerners to the restrictions on movement normal elsewhere.
Of Books, Bikes & Islands 