Election results have always been newsworthy, but these days they generate significantly more interest if perceived as referenda on border, immigrant, and refugee policies. In this heated contested battle for who gets to join the community inside borders, understanding the history of the concept of territory becomes stringent. In his timely book, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500, Charles S. Maier offers a masterful long durée history narrating the evolution of the meaning of ‘territory’ for the last five hundred years in close connection with its political and economic context.
With varied, but unsurprising choices drawn mainly from Europe, North America, Southeast and East Asia, the book’s first two chapters trace an evolution from enlarging empires with fluid imperial borderlands to early modern sovereign states with visible borders. The strength of this section is not its novel interpretation, but a clear synthesis based on new trends in imperial histories, including a push back on the decline paradigm and understanding empires as negotiated rather than merely imposed political creations. Maier’s inspired metaphor of ages of imperial glaciation evokes the continuously shifting nature of imperial borders and the unavoidable dependency between imperial claims to power and territory expansion.
Whereas this chapter argues against the idea of a pre-existing imperial cycle, from rise to decline, Maier does suggest another repetitive pattern of imperial evolution: far-reaching empires develop as part of larger systems and thrive in ‘dyadic relationships’ (46). This interpretation challenges us to rethink competitors as collaborators and suggests a point that could have further refined Maier’s argument: empires competing for limited territorial resources and sharing frontiers inevitably focused their attention on regulating these liminal areas by signing border treaties. ‘Political space take on clearer boundaries as state space intrudes on the space of empires’ (80), not because of states triumphing over empire, but because of imperial rulers and other political elites reframe sovereignty in territorial rather than jurisdictional terms.
Chapter 3 redirects the reader’s gaze to space within borders to discuss how debates about agricultural productivity and the implementation of cadastral surveys brought peasants and their lands under the closer control of government. In the confrontation between monarchs and provincial elites, cadastral maps and registers supported the centralizing efforts of European rulers, reproducing at a smaller scale a pattern of bounded territorial units. Even though mostly restricted to Europe and its trans-Atlantic expansion to the Americas, Maier’s discussion excels at integrating examples from both oceanic and landlocked empires. This is not merely a discussion of Western European states but draws heavily on literature on the German lands and Russia. For example, the analysis of the second serfdom and the efforts of Habsburg rulers to emancipate the peasantry are framed in the larger context of the desire to increase agrarian productivity and the writings of cameralist thinkers, such as Joseph von Sonnenfels (1732-1817) and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717-1771). The details of economic doctrines and the list of names can be overwhelming, but Maier throws his reader helpful lifelines in the form of engaging case studies. The Argentine statesman Manuel Belgrano’s failed attempt to transplant agrarianism and physiocratic ideas of fixed settlements into South America in the early 1810s is a case in point (139-142). Belgrano’s official reports underscore agriculture as the only productive force, stronger than industry, trade or cattle ranching, thus revealing one of the alternative paths that could have been taken in the economic development of Argentina.
Regardless of location, inequality was rooted in access to land, due to its finite nature. And Maier convincingly shows in Chapter 4 how, during the long nineteenth century, the evolution of modern production relying on wage labour was intertwined with reduced opportunities for settling independent or communal agricultural enterprises; and furthermore, how this transformation reflected and influenced the writings of economic thinkers, such as Karl Marx (1818-1883), Achille Loria (1857-1943) and David Ricardo (1772-1823). In addition to the triumph of industrial capitalism, the fear of an imminent depletion of unclaimed territories accelerated an international competition for settlement and annexation on a global scale. But even though the stage has shifted from Europe and the Americas to Africa and South East Asia, a similar understanding of territory prevailed: European rivalries exported boundaries as a form of territorial organization that would allow them access to labour and resources. Lines enclosed territories but also radiated from centres of control in the form of railroads, telegraph and telephone trunks, and shaped the language of scientists exploring electromagnetism.
Chapter 6 charts geopolitics’ reliance on the intrinsic connection between geographic characteristics of territories and distributions of power. From Friedrich Ratzel’s (1844-1904) Lebensraum and Carl Schmitt’s Nomos to the Cold War Age and beyond, spatial order and rivalries continued to be understood as guided by borders and clearly individualized territories. In a sombre tone, Maier lists cases of violence guided by ethnic and religious differentiation and insists that ‘the continuing sociopolitical recourse to territoriality as a dominant mode of establishing the spatial reach of legal regimes for citizenship and property has infused and structured other differential properties of social and cultural organization’ (269). In other words, territorial attachment comes at too high of a cost. Even if one overlooks cases of intense violence as anomalies, the shackle of borders transformed territories into ‘zones of differential privileges’ (279), which the millions of refugees on the move today are forced to challenge.
Maier’s book is more than a well-researched historical endeavour and consciously engages with contemporary political discussions. In the introduction, he describes globalization as the force responsible for complicating the traditional Left-Right political division by challenging the notion that bounded territories in the form of nation states constitute effective political entities. The political success of what Maier calls the ‘territorialist Right’ expresses economically privileged societies’ desire to preserve international borders. Maier frames this conclusion as merely the most recent episode in the long historical evolution of territory as a space characterized by inequality marked with physical lines of division, ranging from the borders of feudal estates to the frontiers of empires and nation-states. What remains unarticulated in this historical tour de force is the voices of those most disadvantaged by political and economic elites’ imagination and re-imagination of territory for the last five hundred years. In the same way that borders are steep gradients of inequality’, (279) the silences of historical archives obstruct a multifaceted narrative of how we came to be within borders.
