King’s College London / UNC Chapel Hill

Council Room, King’s College London
October 21 and 22, 2011

Borderlands assumed a particular significance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Industrialization, the development of the modern city, faster means of communication, the further spread of imperialism and the rise of the modern nation-state meant that borderlands came to encompass and divide more people than before. Increased mobility enhanced the visibility and experience of national borderlands, while administrative developments – in local and regional government, for example – made and unmade intra-state boundaries. The expansion of continental and maritime empires created and destroyed boundaries, for the colonizer as well as the colonized, and did much to foster the idea of the borderland as frontier (in North America, for instance). Overseas trade, the technology and experience of war, exploration and the impress of Enlightenment-generated scientific readings of landscape also left their marks—both real and imagined—on locales around the world.

Not surprisingly, then, borderlands are of great significance to the historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Places of division, liminality, conflict, and identity politics, they have attracted a good deal of scholarly attention. The meaning of particular borderlands to particular groups, their textual and visual representation, imagining and re-imagining have been much studied. What we know less about, however, is the material reality of borderlands as physical places, territories that were lived in, visited, fought over and otherwise experienced by men and women. This is a function of the now notoriously well-known trend in scholarship towards the recovery and analysis of discourse more or less in isolation. While relatively few scholars have explicitly or rigorously followed the post-structuralist line that ‘there is nothing beneath the text’, the effects of the ‘linguistic turn’ more generally have been extraordinarily wide-ranging and pervasive. In historical writing on landscape, space, and place, the discussion of representations and the explication of meaning has at times been divorced from the physical world to which they refer.

This conference seeks to redress the balance, by emphasizing the materiality of borderlands and the ways in which this materiality made possible—or hindered—the making and unmaking of borderlands. While acknowledging that representations, myths, and the imaginary in general are as much part of reality as anything else, it assumes the existence of physical reality beyond the text. Specifically, it seeks to stress the significance of borderlands as territorial realities. And it begins with the assumption that physical realities present a range of possibilities for individual and collective actors in the production of bordered spaces. This is not to say that the conference will ignore discussion of borderlands’ various and contested meanings, which play an important role in these processes, but it is to put more weight on the ‘how’ and the diachronic, as opposed to the ‘what’ and the synchronic. In other words, the papers will not only discuss what borderlands were, or imagined to be, but how they were imagined, and how they came into being as places that were lived in, encountered, negotiated, blurred, and erased.

FRIDAY 21 OCTOBER

9.15 WELCOME

9.30 AMERICAN BORDERLANDS, part I
Negotiating North America’s New National Borders
Benjamin Johnson (Clements Department of History, Southern Methodist University)
Environment, Territory, and Landscape Changes in Northern Mexico during the Era of Independence
Cynthia Radding (Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill)

10.30: Coffee

10:45 AMERICAN BORDERLANDS, part II
Twisted Logic: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River Border Matthew Salafia (Department of History, North Dakota State University)
Frontier, Rangeland, Overland Trail: Borderlands as Sites of Rootedness in the Nineteenth-Century American West Nina Vollenbröker(Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London)
Commentator (parts I and II): Bernard L. Herman (UNC-Chapel Hill)

12.45: Lunch

14.00 INTRA-STATE BORDERLANDS: THE CASE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
After the Fire: Building London and Shaping the Urban Atlantic World, 1666-1710
Bernard L. Herman (Department of American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill)
Living a British Borderland: Northumberland and the Scottish Borders Paul Readman (Department of History, King’s College London)
Unofficial Frontiers: Welsh-English Borderlands in the Victorian Period
Roland Quinault (Institute of Historical Research, University of London)
Commentator: Arthur Burns (King’s College London)

16.00: Tea

16.30 BORDERLANDS OF THE PACIFIC RIM
“The Men Who Made Australia Federated Long Ago”: Frontiers, Borderlands and the Writing of Australian History
Frank Bongiorno(Australian National University)
“We are Comfortable Riding the Waves”: Landscape and the Formation of a Border State in Eighteenth-Century Island Southeast Asia Timothy Barnard (Department of History, National University of Singapore)
Commentator: Richard Drayton (King’s College London)

18.00: Drinks

SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER

9.00 BORDERLANDS AND THE FORMATION OF IDENTITIES
Frontier Indians: IndiosMansos, Indios Bravos and the Layers of Indigenous Existence in the Caribbean Borderlands
Jason Yaremko (Department of History, University of Winnipeg)
Church fights: Nationality, class and the politics of church-building in a German-Polish borderland, 1890-1914
James Bjork (Department of History, King’s College London)
Borderlands and Nation-Building in the Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon
Michael Rowe (Department of History, King’s College London)
Commentator: Chad Bryant (UNC-Chapel Hill)

11.00: Coffee

11.30 TRADE, EXCHANGE AND THE UNCERTAINTY OF BORDERLANDS
Migration, Sanitation and Trade on the Russo-Polish Borderland, 1762-1795
Oksana Mykhed (Department of History, Harvard University)
Insecure Boundaries: The Slave Trade and Slavery in mid-19th CenturyLiberia
Lisa Lindsay (Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill)
Commentator: Dr Jim Bjork (King’s College London)

13.00: Lunch

14.00 BORDERLANDS, THE SEA, AND ISLANDS
Borderland or Finite Space? Conceptions of the Island in Eighteenth-Century France
Mary Sheriff (Art Department, UNC-Chapel Hill)
From Planting Boundaries to Setting Borders in Cement
Daren Ray (Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia)
“Set in the Seas between Britain and Germany”: Heligoland and the Anglo-German Relationship
Jan Rüger (Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck University of London)
Commentator: Lloyd Kramer (UNC Chapel Hill)

16.00: Tea

16.30 SOME IMPERIAL BORDERLANDS
Separating Man from Beast: Borders of Fear within Colonial Singapore Mark Emmanuel (Department of History, National University of Singapore)
Imperialism Inside/Out: Internal Borderlands and the Limits of Colonialism in South Asia
Eric Beverley (Department of History, SUNY Stonybrook)
Commentator: Lisa Lindsay (Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill)

18.00 Drinks

To register for the conference please email paul.readman@kcl.ac.uk by 1 October 2011. Registration is free of charge, although places are limited.