← New Books Network
New Books Network
Kerry Gottlich, "From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
01:14:53
Loading summary
Transcript31 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Mortaza Hatizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Kerry Gottlick about his most recent book, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025 just a few months ago. The book we're going to discuss today is called From From Frontiers to How Colonial Technicians created modern territoriality. Dr. Kerry Gottlick is Lecturer in International Security at the University of Reading. His research has appeared in journals including the American Political Science Review, the European Journal of International Relations, and International Political Sociology. Kerry, welcome to New Books Network.
- [01:53]
C
Thank you very much. It's great to be here. And I should just point out that my affiliation has actually changed since the book was published. So I'm now a lecturer in international politics at City St George's University of London.
- [02:06]
B
Oh, thank you very much for the information. Cool. This is a very topical issue. I guess these days a lot of people are also talking about the idea of borders and territories. And it's quite topical in international news with what's happening in the Middle east and more recently, I guess what's been happening in between us and his claims about Greenland. But we'll talk about some of these ideas.
- [02:33]
C
Can you.
- [02:33]
B
Before we start, can you tell Us a little bit about yourself, your field of expertise, and more importantly, how the idea of this book came to you. In your preface, you start by saying that the book, the story of this book goes back to 2015, some 10 years ago. Yeah. So please introduce yourself and tell us how this idea of the book came to you.
- [02:53]
C
Yeah. Thanks so much. I mean, this is really coming out of my PhD thesis. I mean I, it was, let's say, almost totally rewritten, but it is in essence the product of a PhD thesis journey. I mean, as for my background, I would say it, my background is international relations, particularly what's kind of a subfield of it called historical international relations, which basically looks at international relations from a historian's perspective and kind of challenging the boundaries between the disciplines of history and international relations. I mean, the idea for this project really came from kind of a meeting between things that were going on in the world at the time that this started. And my kind of growing interest in international relations theory and the problems of international relations theory and its difficulty that it has in explaining historical change over time. I mean, in terms of things that were going on in the world at the time, this was. Well, I started the project in about 2015 and that was a time when things were rapidly changing in the Middle East. ISIS was on the rise and there were lots of ideas circulating about how this colonial agreement, the Sykes Picot Agreement 1916, had kind of, that had supposedly laid the foundations the modern Middle east had. It was, was collapsing or there were lots of narratives about the specific kinds of consequences for world politics of this 100 year old colonial agreement. So I was very interested in that and, and kind of, you know, finding out whether whether what was being said was true and sort of probing the limits of those, those narratives that were circulating. But then also on the other hand, kind of getting into international relations theory, I kind of, I mean as a, as a graduate student I became interested in historical, long term, fundamental historical change over time, international system. Because at the time that seemed to me like the best way to defeat the realist theory of international relations, which appeared to be dominant at the time. So in a sense I was really interested in finding out why, you know, how it came to be that we have a world of kind of self sufficient states that seem to be, you know, clearly bounded entities. And the standard theories of international relations didn't seem to be able to explain that. And there was a, there was a developing body of historical international relations. But there were certain ways in which I didn't, I, I didn't actually find, you know, an explanation for how actually precise linear boundaries came into existence. There was a real emphasis on sovereignty and, and lots of different aspects of the state. And, and so what I, what I was really looking for was the origins of the modern boundary. And I didn't really find that in the terms that I, that I had really. I didn't find that in the form that I was looking for. So the project really comes from those two influences.
- [06:46]
B
Thank you. I'd kind of forgotten about 2015, but now that you've mentioned it, I do remember how, especially in Iraq, how there was this for the Kurdish population in Iraq. There was this idea that all these artificial boundaries are collapsing. Maybe it was a flash in the pan only because I think there was a lot of disillusionment for them at the end. They couldn't establish a country. But I do remember that time that everybody was talking about how these ideas of borders are sort of arbitrary, at least in the Middle east, because of the agreement you just mentioned. But before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly, in a nutshell, I know it's a horrible question. What is the whole book about? What do you mean by from frontiers to borders and how colonial technicians created modern territoriality. Will try to, you know, unpack some of the ideas you have in the book. But let's say a two minute summary of the book, if you could give us, would be great.
- [07:45]
C
Sure, yeah. So basically the book is about what is more what is modern territoriality, where does it come from and what does it do to international politics? That's. Those are the, the questions that it tries to answer. The answer comes in kind of two parts. There's sort of the origins. Well, actually there's three parts if you count the theoretical part. So there's a conceptual, theoretical contribution which is about the nature of modern territoriality and that is very much trying to move the emphasis away from sovereignty towards looking at modern boundaries as a practice. So the modern sovereign state is not necessary for the kind of precise linear boundaries that we have. And when I say linear boundaries, I should clarify because oftentimes it can be confusing that when I say linear boundaries, I don't mean straight lines necessarily. I mean there are straight line boundaries, long straight lines in certain parts of the world. But I really mean all modern boundaries because all modern state boundaries at least are based on the idea of line. So even if they're squiggly right, if you zoom in on them, you'll eventually find that they're made up of even small straight lines. So it's a. So linearity is a basic principle of modern boundaries anyway. So the theoretical claim is that modern territoriality is based on technical practices. It's based on expertise and a certain relationship that modern people have in terms of the relationship between expertise and political authority. So there's a certain kind of demarcation problem between the experts who get to define where the boundary is, or really to interpret the boundary and to find it and to place monuments and to maintain them on the one hand, and on the other hand, the political authorities that get to make agreements on where boundaries should be. So, so that's, that's basically the theoretical claim which we can, we can get deeper into later on. And then there, then there are the historical claims, so there's the origins and the consequences. So in terms of the origins, I don't claim that there is one master narrative that explains how linear boundaries came to be throughout the world. I think a better way to do this, at least at the stage that I'm working at, you know, future research might, that that builds on my work, might, might, might do otherwise. But what I've looked at is how modern boundaries arose in particular regions. And I've chosen the regions strategically. So I look first at settler colonies, particularly the 13 colonies in North America, and how settlers starting the 17th century, going on into the 18th, became very wrapped up in surveying practices. That there was a widespread. Well, by the mid 18th century, there's a widespread surveying practice. It was originally largely amateur, so surveying. So the, the colonial society was essentially a surveying society. It was part of land ownership. And so those practices then filtered up into, into international politics in British India, which I also look at. It has to do with this transition in modes of rule for. From non interference towards gathering and producing information about local societies. And yeah, I can go more into detail into that later. But so those are two different modes of explanation for settler colonies and for what I call colonies of extraction. So starting with British India, I look in detail at British India, but I use that as an example of. These are two examples of. So historians have kind of broken down colonialism in general into colonies of settlement and colonies of extraction. And these are examples of both, but they're also key examples in the sense that the thirteen colonies is the first example where we have linear boundaries practiced on a large scale between a whole bunch of different holidays. And British India is really the first example of an extraction colony where linear boundaries are being practiced. So there are different explanations in different parts of the world. And it's largely a colonial story. And it's in much of this is what I've just described is going on at the same time as or before even the origins of modern boundaries in Europe. So that's why I think it's not totally a colonial story, but it is in large part a colonial story. So then, moving on to the consequences part, basically the argument is that a consequence of this practice and its expansion throughout the world is a change in the way that people thought about boundaries. And to kind of skip ahead to the last chapter, essentially boundaries become artificial because of this, the emergence and expansion of this practice of linear boundaries, which has this particular relationship between expertise and politics. So we get this conception of linear boundaries as constructed, as not kind of originating in nature, not given by God or something, but as kind of humanly constructed. And so therefore, in the late 19th century, you have new ideas about how to construct boundaries. What is the best way to construct boundaries? And I look at how those ideas became influential, particularly at the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War, when boundaries of Europe were being redrawn. And I argue that one of the specific aspects of this was the use of mountain boundaries, that there was a particular kind of fascination among these political geographers and experts that I'm talking about with mountain boundaries and an association between mountains and the kind of things that good boundaries were supposed to do. So, yeah, that's it. There's a theoretical, an origin story and a consequences story.
- [15:17]
B
Thank you very much. That was very comprehensive, and there are lots of ideas there which I'm keen to unpack as we go ahead. I was really interested in your introductory chapter where you sort of lay out four narratives about borders. And we don't want to get into details about all four of them, but when I was reading them. So just very briefly, I guess you have the idea that the borders are remarkably vague. This idea of linear borders usually represent is a practice of sovereign states or nation states. And these lines are maps. They are politics. They determine politics usually. And I'm originally myself, the reason I was really interested in that was that I'm originally from Iran myself. And when I talk to some of my friends, I have some ultra nationalist friends with whom I don't really agree. And they always say that Iran is the oldest country in the world. And when they use the word country, they sometimes use the word country with nations synonymously. And they refer to it as nation state, the oldest nation state, which I don't agree with. And I've been doing a bit of History, reading about Iran. And what I found interesting was that people in the past, and not so distant past, maybe 300 years ago, they introduced themselves rather than saying they were Persians, they said they were. They introduced themselves by the city where they came from or they were born rather than the country. And when I was reading it, would that just that episode came to my mind again, because you do talk about the fact that these lines represent politics and nation states, and they're usually vague. Anyhow, I'm rambling what I'm interested in in these four narratives, and I'll leave it to you if you want to explore them a little bit further, maybe. So these four common narratives about global history of borders that you introduced in your introductory chapter, which one do you think is so much entrenched in public understanding of borders and territories?
- [17:22]
C
Well, it's difficult to say which one is most entrenched. I mean, I suppose there is maybe one thing that's kind of basic to a lot of this is, as you say, the nation state, this idea that linear, precise, modern boundaries are something that are inherently connected to nation states and something that is original to them. So there's this idea that boundaries became precise in Europe first with the emergence of nation states, and then this practice of doing linear boundaries was exported through colonialism. So, so it happens first in Europe and then it gets taken kind of as transported to other parts of the world. I think that, you know, there are a lot of these ideas that have been critiqued. You know, people have been critiquing methodological nationalism for ages. People have known that there's a difference between the nation and the state for ages. People have been critiquing colonialism for a long time. You know, so I don't want to set up any straw men here. You know, there's a lot of very interesting work in. In global history and international relations on. On all of these topics that don't. That. That aren't naive and don't fall into these easy kind of traps. But I do think that one of that. One of the most entrenched narratives, at least in scholarship, or, or maybe I should say even in scholarship, is this idea of modern millennium boundaries being something inherent in nation states and then exported through colonialism. And maybe even more basic than that is the idea of diffusionism. So the idea that the way that institutions and practices come about is they arise, they're invented in one place, and then they're transported to another. Now, I don't think that is totally wrong, and I don't claim that diffusion never happens. And you'll find in the book that there are areas where diffusion where I do describe that happening. But I don't think that diffusion is in general a good model for how linear boundaries came to be. And the reason is, because I found in looking at different. The history of boundaries in different parts of the world is that there are specific local reasons or regional reasons why techniques of delimiting and demarcating linear boundaries were used, and that those local or regional reasons appear to me to be more kind of a better explanation in each of those cases than kind of a transplantation of practices already existing in one part of the world to another.
- [20:47]
B
I'm really also interested in the idea of you actually, in your book, you make that distinction between borders as either as expression of sovereignty and also borders as something technical or an apolitical practice. Can you tell us, I think more or less people are familiar with the idea of border as the expression of sovereignty. But what do you mean by border as being a technical practice or an apolitical practice? Can you unpack that idea?
- [21:21]
C
Yeah. So what I do is I start by looking at the categories that practitioners use, and then I try to kind of get behind them, so to speak. So to remain at the level of practice, boundary practitioners and scholars of boundary studies use these terms. Delimitation, sorry, allocation is really the first allocation, delimitation and demarcation, those are terms that are used to describe the process at a technical level of making and maintaining boundaries. Allocation being just the distribution of territory. So that's, you know, that has existed in any historical time period. Delimitation, meaning the description of a line in technical language or on a map that's meant to be proportionally representational. And then demarcation means marking the boundary in the landscape. So typically we think about that using monuments like stones or something. But it could also in some cases be the use of rivers. Although even in, even in those case you. Even in the case of rivers, you sometimes states find it necessary to specify further by pointing to particular points within the river. So that's the U.S. canada border, for example, in many places is river. But. But there are actually specific points in the river that are connected by straight lines that really form the boundary. Anyway, so. So there are a whole load of, of technical practices that get often overlooked when we think about boundaries. There are these experts, these kind of boundary maintenance people that, that get kind of forgotten. And at least in the case of the U.S. canada boundary, there's actually an intergovernmental organization that regulates these Practices that, that makes sure that the monuments are still there where they're supposed to be. They make sure that we know where they are. And the claim implicit in the existence of this organization is that without it we wouldn't know where the boundary is. Actually they literally say this on their website. But there, there's a, this, it, that organization and its practices reveal something fundamental about all modern boundaries, is that they, they require a kind of expert knowledge and practice to, to create and maintain them. And it's often overlooked. But I, one analogy that I like to use is that it's, it's like modern boundaries are like an engineering project. They're like electricity. You know, you, you can easily, if it's working properly, you can easily just ignore it. But if you want to understand how it came into existence, you have to understand it as, as an expert kind of practice.
- [24:27]
B
And another idea that I was also, I guess before reading your book, I was reflected with a misunderstanding. The idea of territorial sovereignty you, you mentioned, I think it's in your chapter two that you mentioned this idea is fundamentally confused. Why has associate territories with sovereignty? But why do you think it's confused? Can you unpack this idea and tell us what do we achieve by let's say, decoupling the idea of sovereignty from territoriality?
- [25:03]
C
Well, I mean there are a number of things that we could achieve by doing it. But I mean really what I'm after in this book is understanding where boundaries come from. And I think if we, if we look at the question of where do boundaries, where do modern boundaries come from as a question of where does sovereignty come from, I think we're going to be missing a large part of the picture. Particularly because as I mentioned, a big part of the story is about colonialism and not the whole story, but a large part of it. In most parts of the world it's a story about colonialism, about entities which are non sovereign and boundaries between non sovereign entities. So, but just to get to the question of why this concept of territorial sovereignty is confused, I mean at a kind of basic level, I think one of the reasons why we associate boundaries with sovereignty is just because we don't have formal colonialism anymore, we, it's, it's easy to overlook the entities that exist in the world that aren't sovereign states. So that, that wasn't the case when linear boundaries came into existence, but it is the case now. So that's, that's a basic, at, at a basic level why people easily confuse boundaries with sovereignty. But, but at a deeper level in the scholarship, there's this notion of territorial sovereignty as the basic aspect of political modernity that needs to be explained. Right. If we, if we want to explain the modern world or the modern international system, territorial sovereignty is the thing to explain that that's what's assumed in a large part of the literature and on historical international relations and beyond. And while I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong in, I mean, obviously sovereignty has a territorial aspect and sovereign states have boundaries, at least they do in modernity. So that's not a problem. The problem is when we're trying to explain the origins of this whole thing and that concept of territorial sovereignty can cause some confusion. So where it comes from is an anthropological theory about modernity, specifically the idea that societies progress from kinship to status. So in, you know, in, in far distant history, everyone was living in tribes and politics was based on kinship. And then we evolved as some kind of humanity into a modern situation where we are autonomous individuals that only that only cohere into societies by contract, by agreement. And, and part of that theory was the idea that you get these territorial entities. So in the contract societies, according to this theory, this is a theory originally associated with Sir Henry Sumner Maine, who was a 19th century legal historian. The idea is that you go from territory as being a merely accidental feature of society to territory being a kind of a basis for society. So whereas ancient societies just happened to live in space, today we use space as, and a clear delimitation of space as the basis for our political societies. So basically, I mean, I could go into some detail on, you know, all the different problems with that concept, but I guess the, the, really the main issues. I, I don't. If you want to have an empirical debate over when that exactly happened, when, when do you go from territory being accidental to territory being a basis for a political society? I think it's, it's extremely difficult to really pinpoint in each particular case. I think there are always going to be debates in each individual case. And usually in the literature it's been treated as a kind of settled thing, as a kind of fact, as something that you can establish in a kind of neutral way, as if, you know, you can just say flat out that France became territorial in the year 1300 or something like that. And I think it's a good deal more complicated than that. So, so essentially that's, that's my basic answer to, to why I think that that concept isn't really fit for purpose. Another way of putting this is ancient polities were territorial I think it's, they had territories. If you, if you do define territory as rule that's meant to exist in a particular space rather than other spaces, that is something I think you can, you know, we can argue about this, but I think there are ways in which you can see that happening in, in pretty much any human society. So I think the, the idea of using territorial sovereignty as a marker of modernity is, is difficult, it's, it's complicated. And so that's why I think looking at modern boundary practices is a, is a, you know, not necessarily a replacement for that. But I do think if your interest is in finding the boundary of modern, where does modernity start? I think that this is a better way to do it to, to look at when practices of delimitation and demarcation started to be pursued systematically. I think that is, I think it's, it's. That sort of inquiry is more amenable to an empirical debate.
- [31:16]
B
I'm thinking that's a perfect segue into my next question, which is about the adoption of linear borders. That idea, linearity that I guess a lot of people have in mind when it comes to borders. What do you see as the most important, let's say, global turning point when this practice of linear borders was adopted, rather than, let's say boundary forms. And why do you think it has become so much dominant? Dominant.
- [31:44]
C
So I think there are a number of turning points. I don't know if I can really say which is more important because I'd have to know what, you know, important for what. It depends. But if I can just point out a number of key turning points. I mean, the first one is in the thirteen colonies of North America when linear boundaries start to be used systematically as a means of distinguishing the territories of those colonies. And that happens Sometime between the 17th and 18th centuries, if I really had to pinpoint it, probably the late 17th centuries when this really got going. You know, when it comes to exact details of dating these things, it can, you know, you can't be too specific, but around that time, so, so that's when it got going in one area of the world in a series of polities for the first time. Then you can say another turning point is when this started to be used in colonies of extraction. So first in, in British India, right at the very end of the 18th century. And then you could say another turning point is when, when linear boundaries started to be used all over the place, kind of regardless of proximity to what would have then been called civilization or, or semi civilized societies. So when. When European empires and their collaborators started to survey boundaries, you know, way. Way up in. In the Hindu Kush mountains, for example, you know, in, you know, continental areas that were very far from the normal kind of power reach of these empires. And that really occurred sort of slowly during the 19th century and really happening in earnest at the end of the 19th century. I think the Russo Afghan boundary survey in the mid-1880s is a really good example of this. So I guess those. Those are really kind of three different turning points that. That you could say. I don't know which of those is. Is more important than another. Yeah, yeah.
- [34:20]
B
And what. What I was. What I'm really interested in is, is. Is the dominance of that linearity rather than boundary forms that you've talked about in the book. Let me ask you another question here. Chapter three was also quite interesting. That's where I think there's one aspect in the book here in chapter three that you discussed that a lot of people had never thought about, including me, and that is when you discuss the role of, let's say, property saving and its relationship with settler colonial conditions in North America and how it shaped the idea of modern territoriality. Can you talk about how did the common practice of, let's say, creating private property turn into a template for this larger political idea or political project of boundary making? Sure.
- [35:21]
C
I mean, so at a really basic level, the. The simple. The simplest way to tell this story is that settlers in North America were, on the whole, relative to other societies, very interested in surveying their pri. They were. Well, they were very interested in private property, first of all, and they were interested in. In surveying those properties, and they did a lot of surveying, and they were thinking about it a lot. And so when they had boundary disputes between the colonies, they approached those disputes in the same way that they would approach disputes between property owners, because they were largely property owners themselves. And so there wasn't really a moment where they decided to start doing this. It was just kind of a natural progression. And then later on, once the settlers became independent as the United States of America, they pretty much immediately used those same techniques to survey boundaries between themselves, between the United States and the other empires, the. The British, the French, the Spanish, and. And the Russians even. But, I mean, yeah, there are a number of things we can say about this at a more detailed level. I don't know if you have particular questions about that. If you could.
- [36:51]
B
It's all right. If you want to provide more details. I don't really have anything particularly in mind here.
- [36:56]
C
Yeah, okay. I mean, so one complicating factor is that this is. It's a gradual process. So I mean, one. One possible objection to this narrative that I've drawn is it's too clean. And that's true. So part of the picture is that the transition from, let's say, pre modern practices of measuring and accounting for space towards modern methods of geometrical surveying was a gradual one. And it was, it was one that was in Europe. It was in process at the time that these colonies started. So when, when the settlers arrived, you know, they. They brought with them, you know, practice older practices like perambulating boundaries. And boundaries were often for. For people. They were, they were to be remembered. They were. They existed in people's memories. And in the very beginning, there was no, there was no surveying profession. So that kind of accounts for a lot of the disputes that that emerged initially. But the expectation after, you know, over time, the expectation turned out that, you know, people. People expected boundaries to be linear and, and they expected them to be surveyed. So what happened, because there was a lack of expertise, they developed an amateur practice. So people had to do the surveying themselves if they didn't have access to a qualified surveyor. And so. So, you know, whereas in Europe, the way it happened was there were, you know, there was a kind of set of qualified surveyors, you know, not. Not that many of them, but they could kind of do the work that was necessary. Whereas in the colony, in the American, in the thirteen colonies, there was a lot more property surveying to be done because people were emigrating in, in numbers, and there was an expectation of individual property ownership that there wasn't. There wasn't that expectation in Europe because of entrenched different, you know, powers and parts of society. Feudalism, to put a blunt word to it. So there was a lot more work to do in the colonies and there was no one to do it. So. So over time, people had to learn how to do it themselves. And that's how it became a kind of, what I call a surveying society. So, you know, if you look through the. The signers of the Declaration of Independence, which I think there were. There were 56 of them. I think six of them were surveyors. If you look at the men on Mount Rushmore, you know, four, four presidents, three of them were surveyors or had surveying experience. So, and. And surveying was a profession that had the kind of presence in society that doctors or lawyers did. It was just, it was. It was ever present. So then when you come to having disputes between the colonies and there were many disputes between the colonies because the, when the boundaries of the colonies were initially defined by, by charter, they were pretty vague and it was, they were pretty, they were not very. London did not try very hard to make sure that the charters that they granted did not overlap. So this basically had to be done on the ground by the settlers themselves, by and large. So, so this is not a top down practice that's being imposed from London. It's largely a practice that's initiated by settlers in order to solve the problems that have been imposed by the particular conditions in the thirteen colonies.
- [41:30]
B
Another part of the book that I was interested in is when you discussed the relation between knowledge and control and space. And that's in the chapter where you talk about British India. How or you trace let's say the formation of modern territoriality to information gathering practices in British India. Can you talk about how saving became, let's say, what do you mean by these information gathering techniques and how did give rise to modern territoriality? What is the relation between knowledge gathering and control of space in the example of British India?
- [42:14]
C
So the initial kind of wisdom was non interference. It was, the idea was preserving at least the kind of justification for British rule was preserving what was there was, was providing a kind of stability to what the British saw as a chaotic place. But this, this evolved in the, in the late 18th century. It became clear that non interference was not going to work because there was. The British knew very, very little about societies in India and they found themselves governing large areas of India at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. And they had this kind of crisis of information because they didn't trust the sources of information that were, that were being given to them. They didn't, they didn't trust local sources. So they had to, I mean, at some level this is a problem that can't be solved because you know, at a very basic level the knowledge of how Indian societies work is, is contained by people who live there. You know, so there's no way that you can get around that problem. But what they, what you can do is, is, is go more systematically to a lot of different local areas and, and ask many different kinds of people. Rather than, rather than trusting particular people, you kind of go and do what they thought of as direct observation. And part of this is also about directly observing kind of the natural environment. And you know, you can do measurement, you can measure the distance between one point and another as accurately as you want. And so, you know, Matthew Edney has this great book on, on the Great Triangulation of India, which was an extremely accurate project of measuring India in, you know, in its breadth and length. The problem for us, though, if we're interested in boundaries, is something like triangulation doesn't really get at this problem because it doesn't deal with society. It doesn't, you know, if you want to know where a boundary is, you know, as in, if you want to preserve an existing boundary rather than create a whole new one. And that's what the settlers were doing in, in North America was, was creating new boundaries. But in India, they were trying to uphold boundaries that already existed. So at some point you've got to ask somebody. You, you have to, you have to kind of make contact with, with society in some way. So this is not a problem. It's a paradox that can't be solved, basically. But you can get closer and closer to what you think of as, as local people. And, you know, one of the more famous aspects of this is in tax administration. So the transition from permanent settlement to the Reit Wari settlement. So the permanent settlement basically just froze taxes. They just said whatever taxes are now, they will always be that. And that was essentially a way of avoiding doing surveys and avoiding having to do the difficult work of figuring out what was there and what the value of the land was, etc. And it also was trying to create stability. That, that was the theory of it. But then it, it moved towards the Reit Wari settlements, which, which were arranged directly with, with individual landholders. And that required a lot more information gathering. You actually have to go figure out where these people are, who they are, and, and, and settle their taxes with them on a kind of individual basis. Okay. So, I mean, historians have looked a lot at that progression from permanent settlement to Riyawari settlement. And my argument essentially is that the transition to linear boundaries is parallel to that. It's not a result of that because it's not a result of kind of trying to find a more efficient system of taxation. Because originally the Riwari settlement wasn't intended to be an efficient system of taxation in the sense of gaining more money. They didn't act. It was actually proving to be bad for revenues. It was. There was a more political logic to it. But what I argue is that the same reasons why the Riya wore settlements seemed to be a good idea. It was all part of this gathering of local information. And surveying turned out to be part of that too. So Colin McKenzie, who was this Scottish surveyor who did the survey of mysore starting in 1799, that was basically the first big boundary surveying project in India. He is known for his collection of all kinds of different information about societies in South India. You know, their, their, their history going back hundreds and hundreds of years and when, you know, so when people do research on those periods of history, they almost invariably have to go through the archive that Mackenzie created because it was, it was so, so extensive. So essentially what I'm trying to say is the surveying of these boundaries is really bound up in that activity of, of, of gaining knowledge about local things. And this contrasts to America, of course, because as I say, in America they didn't have this illusion that they were preserving something that already existed. They, they, they, they were creating boundaries where there weren't boundaries before. Whereas in India they were, they were kind of trying to create a political order to some extent be between entities that, that already existed. Obviously there was a lot of change at the time and they viewed India as a, as a constantly changing kind of place, constantly kind of kind of shifted in, you know, of. Not in a positive, they often portrayed it in a negative light, kind of as an unstable sort of place. But anyway, so, so it was, it was in this attempt to, to figure out where boundaries are. And in order to do that you at some level have to go and ask people because otherwise you don't know what points to measure the distance between.
- [49:41]
B
And thinking towards the beginning of the interview, you mentioned Paris Peace Conference. Can you tell us what Paris Peace Conference was and talk about the role of boundary experts which you believe is overlooked. That is a conference, like I said, technical authority became a powerful force to shape Europe's borders. Can we talk about that? Paris Peace Conference and also the role of boundary experts in creating Europe's borders.
- [50:20]
C
Yeah, so this is kind of transitioning to the consequences part of the book because by the time of the Paris Peace Conference, linear boundaries were largely established in pretty much all parts of the world. So what I try to show is the, the impact of firstly the, the, the kind of knowledge and, and, and kind of this new discipline almost of boundary studies that sprang up as a result of that, the emergence and expansion of the, the practice of linear boundaries and then the impact that that had, that, that knowledge and expertise had on the Paris Peace Conference. I. So what is the Paris Peace Conference? Well, it's the settlement after World War I. And usually when people look at this, there's the typical analysis is, is that it fits somewhere in between a kind of realpolitik of, you know, just power politics between states. You know, the, the, a Kind of piece of the victor is essentially, you know, how France gets Alsace and back because it won the war. This kind of thing, you know, between Realpolitik on the one hand and on the other hand that Wilsonian liberalism that was trying to, it was trying to overthrow balance of power politics and impose, you know, a League of nations in which all self determining nations would get along and, and you know, there wouldn't be any war anymore. So, you know, neither those two pictures, the Realpolitik nor Wilsonian liberalism, neither of those two pictures really came into existence. But what did happen is usually thought to have been influenced by those two things. And what I am saying is that there is a kind of third factor that has been marginalized, which is the, the impact of experts at the Paris Peace Conference. And what I mean by that is the experts and expertise that come out of this practices of linear boundaries. And one of the reasons why they've I think been ignored is because it's difficult to kind of point to their impact. So I think a lot of the, the, there are accounts from, from the Paris Peace Conference that, that are kind of disappointed with the, with the results. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of the, a lot of the accounts deal with, you know, fairly minute details of like, you know, okay, so there was this railroad station here, so they need to divert the boundary around that or you know, these, these fairly, fairly low level, you know, fine grained details. And, and the bigger picture kind of gets lost in the massive details that these people had to work with. And remember these, it, it is largely kind of experts and, and, and sort of lower level people, you know, not, you know, the highest level people like Woodrow Wilson or whatever had very little detailed impact on boundaries. You know, they could intervene in particular areas if they felt strongly and they did. But that really the amount of boundary drawing that had to be done was literally impossible for a small group of people to do. It really had to be done by many different committees over a period of time. And so in practice a lot of the work that the experts did, did actually end up getting filtering into what the boundaries that ended up existing. So the problem with appreciating the role of the experts has really been in getting the bigger picture because it's really, it's a massive detail. And you know, for people at the time, I think it was, it was hard to, you know, looking back on the work that they did, it was hard to imagine that it really, you know, amounted to anything in particular. And, and I think that's wrong because I pound I point specifically to the role of mountain boundaries. So mountain boundaries are a thing that, that come specifically into prominence at the end of the 19th century, particularly with people like Thomas Holdich who was the superintendent of frontier surveys in India and in for a long time at the end of the 19th century. And he was a big advocate of mountain boundaries. The reason being that they separate people essentially? Well, two reasons. One, that they separate people, which is what boundaries at this point are supposed to do. And two is that they're clear, according to Holdich, at least they, they form kind of clear fences, that they, they're kind of unambiguous signs in the landscape that can be used by intelligent experts. Okay, so how does this impact on the boundaries we have today? Well, there are loads of examples. I look at three areas in particular. One being Czechoslovakia where that was an example where basically a committee kind of decided that the, that they would keep the boundaries of Bohemia and Moravia that existed within the former Austro Hungarian Empire and that would be the boundaries of Czechoslovakia more or less. There were to be some small changes and they agreed that within about five minutes and there was almost no discussion. And then that just kind of filtered into reality with very, very little kind of discussion over it. The reason being that partly that they're historical boundaries, so they had a bit of legitimacy that way, but also that there are mountains all around the kind of the, the western swing of the Bohemian boundary. And that was supposed to provide Czechoslovakia with some security against Germany, which people were afraid of. Obviously, you know, if you actually look at the history of the lead up to World War II is almost counterproductive because it meant that you kept German speaking areas in Czechoslovakia. And that was exactly the hit, the grievance that Hitler used in order to mobilize support for his war of conquest. This also happened in a different way in the, the Italy Austria boundary where basically a German speaking part of, well, what was the former, former Austria Hungary came to be part of Italy. And again this was justified by Italy having a watershed boundary. So it was supposed to be a natural boundary that would protect Italy again from, you know, if Austria were to combine with Germany in the future, which it did, then that would provide Italy with some security. Obviously again, that didn't help because Italy was an ally of, of Germany in the Second World War. So but anyway it provided a kind of legitimacy for including German speaking areas in Italy. And this is particularly interesting because this is the, this is one area where Wilson himself intervened quite directly and emphatically into the proceedings insisting that Italy have this boundary. And it really contradicted what most people thought, thought was Wilson's principle, which was the national principle. So there isn't really a clear Wilsonian logic for why all these Germans should be included in Italy. And he, so he relied on his experts. So, so each country at the Paris peace conference had some experts that they would rely on to, to justify their, to, to, to formulate first of all the policies, but also to justify them. The US did this in the most systematic way by producing what's called the inquiry, which is like a. Conceptualized as a kind of human computer. And essentially Wilson, I mean, the reasons that Wilson advocated for this Italian mountain boundary were political and you know, would lead, you know, to explain that would lead to a different set of discussion, different set of discussions. But in order to justify that claim, he relied on his experts who told him that the, the highest crest of the Alps is the natural boundary of Italy. And he, so he relied on that argument. So I look at a number of different areas where mountain boundaries provided an alternative logic to what we would typically think of as Wilsonian self determination.
- [60:10]
B
I have one final question which, which has to do more with, more or less with today's geopolitical tensions. And again, in your conclusion, you talk about artificial boundaries. I'm interested to know, with all these tensions such as AI driven mapping, drone surveillance, disputes in Eastern Europe, South China Sea, you know, migration, climate induced migration, how do you think historical insights that your book offer us can help us better understand the challenges of border governance in the 21st century? Especially when, you know, technical expertise and political authority are increasingly intertwined in this area.
- [60:57]
C
Yeah, I mean, I would say my main concern in the book was to explain, you know, historical change over time. But it is a fair question. I mean really, my honest answer is that this, doing this work of this book has pushed me, I feel, into a position that I am a bit uncomfortable with, but I can't find any rational way out. And it's this, that linear boundaries are very sticky in a sense that they, It's a system of managing space that is very persistent now, now that it's entrenched and that it's very unlikely that the practices that I'm talking about will, will cease to be the basis for territoriality or the, the basis for, for managing the, the relation between politics and space, let's put it that way. So, you know, there are all kinds of developments in technology. You know, when, when I was doing this project, you know, there were, there were Lots of, you know, I, I found lots of literature on, you know, boundaries in space or boundaries in the air, how, how, how boundaries had to be extended upwards. There's literature on the, the impact of, of digital technologies on boundaries. And I mean, you know, that, that all has a, has a point and a purpose to it. But just if I, if I look at it from the perspective of, of, you know, the long deray, the long term perspective of fundamental change, it doesn't. The, the changes that those things all present seem to me to be fairly minor in comparison to the change that, that the book tries to, to explain, which is the origin of this, this bundle of practices that we call linear boundaries. And I really, I think the, based on having done this work, I think there's really only one thing that I can think of that would change this, which would be we would have to have some different, we, our relationship or the, the way that we think about the relationship between politics and expertise I think would have to change. So you know, if you think about post truth politics, for example, maybe way down the line this could have some, some impact along these lines. So if people, you know, people in, in the world today are trusting experts less and less, at least that's, that's what we're told. There's, there's less and less trust in, you know, there's, there's a kind of gap opening up between what, you know, what we might think of as ordinary people on the one hand and scientific knowledge or expert technical stuff on the other hand. You know, I don't think that gap is nearly wide enough to really impact what I'm talking about. But if we want to talk about what could change this, I think that would be, that would be it if it came to be the case that you couldn't. That let's say, let's say for example in a future world that some populist group comes up with their own technique for surveying a boundary and they think like, let's just say the US Canada boundary is, is the 49th parallel, right? And some populist surveying group claims that they've surveyed the boundary. They actually think it's somewhere else. They actually think, you know, assuming that these are Americans, let's say actually the 49th parallel is a great deal further north and it encompasses a lot of Canada's territory into the US and then they pressure, they pressure the US Government to, to reclaim that law, American territory. Now still, I mean as I'm describing it, I think that that still wouldn't be. That wouldn't really be outside the system of modern territoriality that I've outlined because at least the way that I said it, I think that that claims that there's, that the, that this hypothesized group has a, has a better and, and more accurate way of measuring the boundaries. So I think what it would have to be was, would be they would have to have some different method that wouldn't rely on surveying. It would, it would have to be some. I don't know. You know, it's, it's. It's just difficult for me to imagine even what it would look like to, to really successfully deconstruct this, this series of practices because I think it's, it's deeply entrenched that, that, you know, measuring. Yeah, measuring is an, is an activity done by, by experts that by. Done by technicians. And, and there's a, there's a relationship between, you know, the, the, the manip. You know, maintaining boundaries is about the manipulation of relative locations of objects in space. And this is, it's essentially a technical thing. Unless, you know, somebody comes up with a new set of ideas that, that I'm not aware of. Now, of course, I should qualify this and say there are lots of different ways in which people understand space that are parallel to modern boundaries. You know, we all have different ways of thinking about space in our, in our, in our homes, in our, in our neighborhoods, you know, and this differs in different parts of the world. And you know, some people advocate that, for example, African boundaries should be replaced by, by different sorts of things that are based on local concepts. And anyway, so, so these, these different kinds of concepts and practices exist in parallel to, to modern territoriality. As far as I can see, they don't challenge it. So anyway, to answer your question, it's really having done this work, I feel driven into a fairly structuralist position where I. It's. It's very difficult for me to, to, to see a genuine kind of change that wouldn't just be something parallel going on at the same time as modern territoriality. I think modern territoriality is here to stay.
- [68:09]
B
Yeah, you're right. I think as you mentioned, it's so much interaction that it's even difficult to imagine a different alternative. Let's say. Before we say goodbye, I know that you've recently published this book with Cambridge University Press, but is there any other project or books you're working on that might be published sometime soon?
- [68:30]
C
Yeah, so as a kind of follow up to this book I've been working on, the history of territorial Integrity in some senses, the notion of territorial integrity, you could argue, is a kind of result of the success of the emergence and spread of linear boundaries. But essentially territorial integrity being the non conquest principle, the idea that it's bad or illegal to conquer territory. So I published an article in International Organization recently on the 19th century Inter imperialist kind of precursor to the territorial integrity. So I argue that, well, normally it's, it's, it's conventional to think of territorial integrity as arising after the First World War or even the Second World War. I think 19th century imperialism laid the groundwork for it because no European empire ever conquered colonial territory from another European empire between Napoleon and the First World War. So that laid a kind of a groundwork for, for boundaries that largely still exist. And that's before the, the modern, the kind of 20th century idea of territorial integrity came into existence. The reason they didn't do, they didn't conquer from each other is, is essentially because they had a, a sort of a common purpose which they called civilization and commerce. And that would have made, I'm not saying it's impossible that they, in an alternate universe they could have, you know, there are alternate, you know, it wasn't totally free of contingency, but it can be explained by reference to common, largely shared ideas about civilization and the purpose of colonialism. But then of course, the, the real kind of 20th century concept of territorial integrity as we know it comes, I argue in work that I'm, that I'm working on right now from American, or maybe you could say Anglo American practices of informal imperialism, particularly the open door policy, essentially the non, the non conquest principle makes sense in a world where the dominant power has already decided not to conquer territory for reasons of its own. So after about 1900, the United States decided for its own reasons not to conquer territory. And then after that it made sense to propagate that rule more generally.
- [71:30]
B
Thank you. I hope she'll be able to speak to you about your book when it's out. And I do like to thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us about your book. The book we just discussed was called From Frontiers to Borders, How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality, published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Kerry Gottlick, thank you very much for your time to speak with us on New Books Network and thank you.
- [71:58]
C
So much for your questions.