Negotiating North America’ New National Borders

The introductory essay of this volume refers to the ‘diluvial proportions’ of the literature on borders and borderlands in North American history, a description that might with equal justice be applied to the entire historiography of the United States and the imperial currents from which it emerged in the late eighteenth century. Like US historiography as a whole, the body of work on North American borderlands simultaneously benefits and suffers from its richness and size: its students have the privilege of joining a scintillating and vibrant conversation, but at the same time its volume can all too easily crowd out the discussions emanating from other rooms in the mansion of history. Borderlands, as the introduction also notes, ‘were worldwide phenomena during the modern era,’ yet North Americanists have rooted their accounts in the .distinctive regional, colonial, and national histories most clearly shaping their subjects. 1 We have thereby left largely unexplored the question of whether or not there are important enough dynamics of borders and borderlands in general to warrant the kind of broadly comparative approach undertaken in this book, and locked ourselves in too close a conversation to learn from those examining similar developments elsewhere.

Geography · Negotiation · Political science · Canadian Policy and Governance · Cross-Border Cooperation and Integration · Law