Forum Essay: Responses

A Note on the Use of North American Borderlands

EVAN HAEFELI

Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron have made a welcome effort to bring some intellectual rigor and precision to the blossoming historiography of the frontier. They propose cutting a new slice in the theoretical cake by drawing a distinction between a frontier, "a meeting place of people in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined," and borderlands as "the contested boundaries between colonial domains."1 The concept of borderland can thus link intercolonial and transatlantic imperial histories to localized intercultural histories. As such, it could provide a framework that reminds American historians that their accounts of Indian-colonist relations, be they in Missouri or New Mexico, are as dependent on events in distant Mexico City and Paris as on the actions of the agents, traders, and headmen on the ground.	1
I, for one, welcome such a sophisticated marriage of local and imperial perspectives. Yet, in reading through Adelman and Aron's case studies, I was left a bit confused as to how they mean to accomplish this. Their essay regrettably fails to maintain a consistent distinction between frontier and borderland phenomena. To start with, it is doubtful whether the "middle ground" of the Great Lakes region was a borderland product. On the contrary, it seems to have been a frontier creation that borderlands repeatedly destabilized. The middle ground grew out of the unequal yet interdependent relationship between two groups from very different cultures in the decades before British traders entered the Great Lakes region. Once they did, the advent of borderland dynamics virtually destroyed the middle ground. Only the restoration of a frontier situation after the Seven Years' War allowed the middle ground to resurface. The return of the borderland with the rise of the American republic, culminating in the War of 1812, only put the final nail in the coffin. Perhaps this is one reason that the Spanish in Missouri and the Southwest had such difficulty acting like the more diplomatically successful French. There, borderland conditions persistently undercut the fragile emergence of a Spanish middle ground.	2
The unanswered question at the root of Adelman and Aron's thesis is: what do borderlands do that frontiers do not? They see borderlands as regions of exceptional accommodation, à la middle ground; places where the options of the natives are multiplied by having two (or more?) colonial powers to play off one another. But borderlands restrict natives' options at least as much as they increase them. Within a borderland, the choice is not between their way and our way but between the alliance of one or another empire. Trying to play one colonial power off of another only ups the ante of potential destruction to local autonomy. As the work of Daniel Richter shows, being caught in the Franco-British borderland of northern New York/southern New France put an extraordinary amount of stress on Iroquois communities. The end result of trying to balance French and British influences while maintaining peace with both was a steady increase in the amount of European influence in the Iroquois heartland.2 The pressure of being stuck in a borderland threw the Choctaws, cited by Adelman and Aron, into a devastating civil war. One could argue that borderlands were actually more destructive and less accommodating than frontiers because they reduced the range of options while increasing the imperial presence.	3
If both borderlands and frontiers are seen as situations created by certain conditions, then their existence must rise and fall as those conditions change. Unfortunately, Adelman and Aron's use of terminology obscures this. How could borderland ways persist on the Missouri once France and Spain had been removed from the picture and it was incorporated into the United States? Does not the "mutual process of 'frontiering'" they see in the early national period belong to a frontier rather than a borderland experience?3 Can a region not go from a frontier to a borderland and back again? Must the trajectory always be "from borderlands to borders"? Could one have a borderland without colonial powers? And finally, does the rise of the nation-state belong to the history of borderlands and frontiers, or is it simply the end to these essentially imperial phenomena wherever it appears? Adelman and Aron's essay raises more questions than it answers.	4
At the heart of my concern is the question of what, if anything, North American history and historiography can say to the rest of the world.4 Adelman and Aron make no real effort to answer the question because their historiographical targets reside within the now firmly ensconced field of western (U.S.) history. Are they, then, making a genuine theoretical contribution to the study of frontier and imperial dynamics? Or are they just tweaking the familiar old story of American expansion? Recent frontier scholarship has rendered this tale more complicated and less biased, but the scholarly fascination with American frontier and western history retains much of the narcissism of Frederick Jackson Turner's celebratory thesis. Through all their criticism and revision, scholars have preserved Turner's obsession with the history of the United States rather than frontiers per se.5 One has to wonder whether they have produced anything more than a colorful new overcoat to the old story of nation building. Ultimately, Adelman and Aron's suggestions need to be considered in the context of frontiers and borderlands other than those of the early republic before they can be accepted as a genuine theoretical breakthrough. In terms of world history, North America's frontiers were remarkable for their instability and fluidity. Elsewhere, frontiers of powerful societies tended to form along ecological boundaries and last for centuries. Deserts, deep forests, and vast steppe lands halted the expansion of Mesoamerican, Andean, Roman, Middle Eastern, Egyptian, and Chinese civilizations. Their frontiers had little in common with the steady march of the American frontier across the continent. Even though these earlier civilizations built walls and fortresses to delimit and bolster their power, they were as liable to be conquered by as to conquer the "barbarians" on the other side. Nor did military conquest or even settlement always bring an end, or "closing," to the frontier. Until undermined by technology or dramatic political changes, frontiers always risked reestablishing themselves. In North America, on the other hand, forts, frontiers, and boundaries rose, fell, and shifted dramatically within the span of a single lifetime. At virtually no point after about 1640 did the colonizers risk being conquered or driven out by Amerindians (the Pueblo Revolt being a rare, and brief, exception in 1680). Once established on the North American continent, nothing short of well-defended forts and open warfare limited the expansion of Anglo-American agriculturalists across the highly compatible ecologies of the vast eastern woodlands into northern New England, Kentucky, or the Southeast. Technological innovation and a terrific mobilization of resources enabled their rapid expropriation of the more geographically challenging West, which had even less power to fight them off.	5
Only the long-enduring Spanish frontier in the Southwest, limited by the natural environment and the tenuousness of the Spanish presence, resembles anything beyond the North American experience. Here as elsewhere in Spanish America, the Spanish empire had difficulty penetrating beyond the spheres of influence of the settled indigenous societies it had supplanted. This may be a reason why North Americanists have had difficulty reconciling Anglo-American models of the frontier with the experience of the Southwest, and why scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick believe that a regional approach to western history is the best. Yet it is in their narrative of the Southwest that Adelman and Aron's borderlands concept seems best applied. Other parts of North America where it might work well are the Northeast, between New England and New France, and the colonial Southeast, where borderlands lasted continuously for nearly a century.	6
North American history has had a very distinct trajectory. At the same time, it has an exceptionally well-documented and studied frontier experience, one that, with care, could be of genuine interest to scholars of frontiers and borderlands around the globe. If the idea of a borderland is to have some substance, it needs to be differentiated more clearly from its close relative, the frontier. As a place where autonomous peoples of different cultures are bound together by a greater, multi-imperial context, it may be a concept of use to historians of other obvious borderlands, like the early modern Balkans and Central Asia, the northwest territories of the British Raj, or certain corners of the ancient Near East. Otherwise, it will remain a mere catch-phrase for the brief period of frenetic activity preceding the irresistible expansion of Anglo-America.	7
Evan Haefeli is a fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, where he is completing his Princeton University dissertation on religion and politics in the middle colonies. His most recent publication is "Kieft's War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial America," in Michael A. Belleisle, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (1999). He is also collaborating with Kevin Sweeney of Amherst College on a study that uses the 1704 attack on Deerfield as a lens onto New England's borderland history. Their William and Mary Quarterly article on the topic has been reprinted in Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (1997). Notes The author would like to thank Marc Abrams and Ignacio Gallup-Diaz for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. 1 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," AHR 104 (June 1999): 815–16. 2 Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), chaps. 10–11. 3 Adelman and Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," 827. 4 For a compelling discussion of the uniqueness of North America's frontier history, see John M. Murrin, "The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism," Presidential Address, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, July 17, 1999. 5 See, for example, the admirable synthesis of recent work by Gregory H. Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (New York, 1997).

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