The Transformation of the World (72 page)

In hundreds of books and essays, Frederick Jackson Turner's original concept of the frontier has been situated within the history of ideas, refined by neo-Turnerians, condemned by critics, and rather pragmatically adapted to the standpoint of various historians. The associated vision of the national past has deeply marked America's understanding of itself even in places where Turner's name is unknown. The myth of the frontier has a history of its own.
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Turner's originality lay in his elaboration of a concept that was at once clearly defined as a scientific category and intended as a master vision for understanding the special historical destiny of the United States. For Turner, the settlers' opening up of the thinly populated regions of the West was the key to nineteenth-century American history; the ever-shifting frontier had carried “civilization” into a realm of untouched nature. Insofar as the “wilderness” was inhabited by natives, it was a place where humans at different “stages” of social evolution encountered one another. Not only was the frontier geographically mobile; it also opened up a space of social mobility. The “transfrontiersmen” and their families were able to achieve material success through hard work and a constant struggle against nature and “native peoples.” They forged their own happiness and in the process created a new type of society. This new society involved an unusual degree of sameness and coherence in its underlying assumptions and attitudes—in comparison not only with Europe but also with the less volatile and more hierarchical society of the American East Coast.

At once visionary and painstaking researcher, Turner identified several different kinds of frontier. As always happens with model building, though, his followers took the labor of classification to excessive lengths in trying to fit the rather general basic concept to an endless variety of historical phenomena. Ray Allen Billington, for example, the most influential of the neo-Turnerians, differentiated six successive “zones” and “thrusts” in the push to the west: first came the fur traders, then the cattle drivers, the miners, the “pioneer farmers,” the “equipped farmers,” and finally the “urban pioneers” (who closed the frontier and built
stable urban societies).
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Critics objected to this overly abstract sequence, pointing out that it neglected the political-military dimension and wondering what was meant by terms such as the “opening” or “closure” of a particular frontier. Turner himself had explicitly refrained from offering a precise definition. But the new frontier studies that took over his impetus replaced a sharp dividing line between “civilization” and “wilderness” with the concept of “zones of encounter,” without ever providing a widely accepted definition of what this meant.

One tradition diverging from Turner—Walter Prescott Webb is here the key author—looked back at world history and emphasized the active and “organic” side of the frontier, its ability to change those things with which it comes into contact.
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This idea later inspired Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of the incorporation of peripheral regions into a dynamic world system. Alistair Hennessy, in a remarkable comparative essay, presented the sum of all frontier processes as quite simply “the history of the expansion of European capitalism into non-European areas,” as the irreversible spread of the commodities and money economy and European conceptions of property into overseas expanses of endless grassland: the prairies of Canada and the Great Plains of the United States, the Argentine pampas, the South African veldt, the Russian/Central Asian steppes, and the Australian outback.
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And William H. McNeill, the great master of world-historical analysis, applied Turner's concept to Eurasia, with a stress on the theme of freedom that had already been supremely important to Turner himself. McNeill sees the frontier as ambivalent: a clear political and cultural dividing line, but also an opening up of free and empowering spaces no longer to be found in the more highly structured core zones of stable settlement. For example, the position of the Jews was markedly better in frontier areas, where they often settled, than under less fluid conditions.
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Should the frontier be regarded as a space that can be demarcated on a map? There is much to be said for the alternative view of it as a special social constellation. This would give us the following definition, sufficiently broad but not too woolly:
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a frontier is an extensive (not simply local) situation or process where, in a given territory, at least two collectives of different ethnic origin and cultural orientation, usually under the threat or use of force, maintain contacts with each other that are not regulated by a single overarching political and legal order. One of these collectives plays the role of the invader, whose primary interest is in appropriating and exploiting land and/or other natural resources.

A specific frontier is the product of a push from outside, which mainly originates in private initiative and only secondarily enjoys state or imperial support or rests upon conscious instrumentalization by a particular government. The settler is neither a soldier nor an official. The frontier is a sometimes persistent but theoretically fluid state of affairs marked by high social volatility. In the beginning, at least two “frontier societies” stand opposed to each other, each inserted into externally driven processes of change. In a minority of cases (the “inclusive frontier”) they merge together into one (always ethnically stratified)
hybrid society, whose
métissage
existed, above all in North America, as an “underground” beneath the respectable society of white Protestant heads of families.
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As a rule, unstable equilibria break down in a way that disadvantages one of the sides, which is then excluded, separated, or even physically expelled from the ever more solid (“modernizing”) social context of the stronger collective. An intermediate stage on the way to this is the situation in which the weaker side becomes dependent on the stronger. While the frontier opens up space for communication—in new pidgin languages, for example—and for the enhancement of special types of cultural self-understanding, the most important lines of conflict are in noncultural spheres: on the one hand, the struggle over land and the elaboration of ownership concepts, and on the other hand, various forms of work organization and labor-market structures.

The invaders marshal three self-justificatory patterns, separately or together as need dictates:

1. the right of the conqueror, which may simply declare existing occupation rights to be null and void

2. the seventeenth-century Puritan doctrine of
terra nullius
, which regards land populated by hunter-gatherers or herdsmen as “ownerless,” freely acquirable, and in need of cultivation

3. the missionary duty to civilize “savages,” often added afterward as a secondary ideology or
post festum
legitimation of coercive dispossession

Although the frontier concept is today used in everyday speech for any conceivable case in which profit can be made in a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation, historical frontiers have the aura of transitions from premodern conditions. Once a region in question has linked up with the main technological macrosystems of the modern world, it soon loses its frontier character. The taming of nature then also passes quickly into corporate exploitation of resources. Thus, the coming of the railroad—not only in the American West—destroyed the precarious balances already in existence. The frontier is a social constellation that essentially belongs to an intermediate period, on the eve of the steam engine and the machine gun.

Frontier and Empire

How are frontier and empire related to each other?
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Here the argument has to be mainly spatial. Nation-states never have frontier spaces on their borders. Frontiers, in the sense in which we are using the word here, can persist after the initial invasion only when no clear territorial borders are defined and when the process of state organization is still patchy or rudimentary. In the frontier perspective, “the state” is relatively far away. The borders of empires are typically, but not always, frontiers. As soon as empires stop expanding, frontiers stop being zones for potential incorporation and are transformed into exposed flanks in the struggle against external threats. They become uncontrollable spaces beyond what is
perceived as the empire's defensive perimeter—menacing voids beyond the last watchtower, from which guerrillas or mounted warriors might suddenly appear. In the nineteenth-century British Empire, the North-West Frontier of India was one such neuralgic zone, which required special techniques of mountain warfare (traveling light in unfamiliar terrain); the Russians in the Caucasus and the French in Algeria fought similar border wars.
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In contrast, the Northern Frontier of British India toward Tibet evinced no vulnerabilities of that kind; it was not really a “frontier” but an international
border
, defined through complicated negotiations between states.
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This was also true of the borders that European colonial powers agreed to among themselves in Africa or Southeast Asia, although locally they were often of such little practical effect that the paper geography of political sovereignty was overshadowed by a more real geography of “lived” frontiers, not infrequently in the interaction between plainsmen and highlanders.

Where two or more colonial powers disputed a region with modern concepts of territorial statehood, we should speak not of frontiers but of
borderlands
, which, according to a student of Turner, Herbert Eugene Bolton, are “contested boundaries between colonial domains.”
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Here the possibilities of action are different from those in a frontier zone: indigenous people may to some extent play rival invaders off each other, continually crossing the various border lines. But once an intercolonial agreement is reached, it always operates to the disadvantage of local people. In an extreme case, whole peoples may be deported across borders, or transfers may be negotiated, as they were as long ago as the eighteenth century between the Tsarist and the Qing empires.

The attitude of imperial powers to frontiers is structurally ambivalent. Frontiers are constantly turbulent and therefore threaten what any empire must regard as the highest good following a period of conquest: namely, peace and order. Armed and unruly pioneers vitiate the monopoly of force that the modern state, including the colonial state, seeks to wield. A frontier on the edge of a colony can therefore seldom be more than a temporary state of affairs, a region that is “not yet” or “soon no longer” imperial. Nation-states are less able than empires to tolerate special “frontier societies,” except where the natural environment compels them to do so. Frontier areas, then, do not realize the idea of empire in a pure form; they are at best countenanced as an anomaly. Or more generally, settler colonialism and empire are two quite different things. Unless settlers are actually dispatched as “armed farmers” to an insecure border zone, the imperial center regards them as inherently contradictory: “ideal collaborators” (Ronald Robinson
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) but also a source of endless political trouble (from intractable Spanish
conquistadores
to the white elite of Southern Rhodesia, who declared independence unilaterally in 1965).

Recently the most interesting new meaning given to the frontier has been ecological. Turner already mentioned the “mining frontier” as perhaps second in importance to the settler frontier: it usually brought about more complex societies than a purely agrarian constellation and was capable of being completely
independent. More generally, one might speak of resource-extraction frontiers—an economic but at the same time also an ecological concept. In fact, “ecology” also played a major role in the classic frontier, where settlers had to attune their farming methods to new environmental conditions. They lived with wild animals, bred livestock, and—to simplify greatly—drove their cattle-based civilization into regions where Native American civilizations had depended on the bison. One cannot speak of frontiers and be silent about the environment.

Another approach, independent of Turner, leads in a similar direction. In 1940 the American traveler, journalist, and Central Asia expert Owen Lattimore published his pathbreaking work,
Inner Asian Frontiers of China
. This interpreted the history of China in terms of a permanent conflict (symbolized by the Great Wall) between farming and pastoral cultures, two ways of life explicable mainly by their different natural foundations.
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Lattimore's method was not at all geodeterminist, however, since in his view the basic contradiction between farmland and steppe was to be understood politically. Wide scope for manipulative action developed both in China and in the steppe empires that repeatedly emerged on its peripheries, the ultimate antagonism being the clash between nomadic herdsmen and settled farmers.

In light of the new interest in ecological aspects, Turner's insights may be usefully combined with the much broader viewpoint developed by Lattimore. Historians who range the whole of man's extensive intervention in nature under the “frontier” category directly link up with the idea of resource-extraction frontiers. In John F. Richards's environmental history of the early modern world, for example, the “frontier of settlement” appears again and again as the guiding thread. The process that reached a climax and a conclusion in the nineteenth century can be traced back to the early modern period, when technically better-equipped settlers occupied land that had previously been used (but not “deeply tilled” in an agricultural sense) by pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. The pioneers everywhere invoked their more productive land use to justify displacement of existing types of farming and hunting. They cleared forest, reclaimed marshes, irrigated dry land, and massacred the part of the fauna that they regarded as useless. At the same time, they had to adapt their methods to new environmental conditions.
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In the argument of Richards's great work, the social, political, economic, and ecological aspects of frontiers cannot be separated from one another; he himself investigates frontier constellations around the world and is therefore able to present the phenomenon from each of these angles. Since this chapter cannot aspire to such regional completeness, the resource-development frontier will be treated only briefly in a later section below.