Picture: The cover picture from the 2009 WLA Conference Flyer. http://www.usu.edu/westlit/conference2009.htmHere are my notes from some articles I recently read. I thought you may find them marginally interesting. They give a little background on The Comanche Empire.
Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104:4 (Oct. 1999): 814-841.
John R. Wunder and Pekka Hamalainen, “Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays,” American Historical Review 104:4 (Oct. 1999): 1229-1234.
Evan Haefeli, “A Note on the Use of North American Borderlands,” American Historical Review 104:4 (Oct. 1999): 1229-1234.
Michael Baud, and William Van Schendel. “Toward a Comparative History of the Borderlands.” Journal of World History 8:2 (Fall 1997): 211-242.
In “From Borderlands to Borders” Adelman and Aron suggest that historians should recognize a theoretical 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.” This distinction enables borderland histories to incorporate transnational imperial histories into localized accounts of the actions and decisions of colonial agents and their adversaries. For Adelman and Aron this is an advantage, because not enough borderlands and frontier histories stress the significance and relevancy of conflict and competition between rival imperial European powers. To do so in their view is critical to understand the "shift from inter-imperial struggle to international coexistence turned borderlands into bordered lands." In other words, the emphasis ought to be on inter-imperial struggle and not other factors. By clarifying the meaning of the borderlands in their article, Adelman and Aron hope to theoretically resuscitate the frontier as a term and concept, which had fallen in their view unnecessarily out of fashion because of the imperial stigma attached to it.
Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel arrive at a much different conclusion in “Towards a Comparative History of the Borderlands,” which similarly attempts to construct a conceptual framework for the borderlands. Baud and van Schendel argue against a purely state-centered approach and adopt instead "a cross-border perspective, in which the region on both sides of a border is taken as the unit of analysis." For Baud and van Schendel, social, economic and cultural analyses of the borderlands are as determinative as more traditional state-centered focuses like those advocated by Aron and Adelman.
John Wunder and Pekka Hamalainen offer a blistering critique of Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s “From Borderlands to Borders” in their article, “Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays.” In the article they write that Adelman and Aron’s view of the borderlands as “sanitized, morally neutral” lands where American Indians populations are decimated and “imperial warfare” is prioritized is unacceptable. Wunder and Hamalainen have four major complaints about Adelman and Aron: 1) they advocate process history where Indians are not empires and they reject Limericks’s view of an “unbroken past,” (2) they simplify an “enormously complex historical phenomenon” by emphasizing global colonial rivalries, (3) they “repeatedly downplay the significance of economic relations in politics” and (4) they factor in no Indian agency in their analyses. In the end, Wunder and Hamalainen write that Adelman and Aron’s analyses are critically flawed as they “reject fundamentals of indigenous history”.
Evan Haefeli jumps in the mix too in his “A Note on the Use of North American Borderlands,” criticizing Adelman and Aron for “regrettably” failing “to maintain a consistent distinction between frontier and borderland phenomena.” For Haefeli, Adelman and Aron never answer the crucial question of “what do borderlands do that frontiers do not?” (1222). Haefeli like Wunder and Hamalainen, suggests that Adelman and Aron “make no real effort to answer the question” of “what, if anything, Native American history and historiography can say to the rest of the world” (1223). Haefeli writes that possibly Adelman and Aron, restrained by the traditional box of western history and methodology, are simply “tweaking the familiar old story of American expansion” while retaining “much of the narcissism of Frederick Jackson Turner’s celebratory thesis” (1223).
To conclude, many of the issues Adelman and Aron’s article raised ten years ago continue to be contested to this day. The exact meaning and relevance of the terms borderlands and frontier are such a concern that Pekka Hamalainen in his 2008 work, The Comanche Empire, dedicated pages in its introduction to defending his use of the term frontier. For Hamalainen, the frontier has been “recast as a zone of cultural interpenetration” that is vital for historical analyses: “the history of Indian-Euro relations, as we today understand them, is inseparable from the history of the frontier” (7). In any case, Adelman and Aron deserve kudos for publishing the article ten years ago that inspired much of this debate. Its influence is noticeable in contemporary scholarship, like The Comanche Empire, which is advertised by the author as an “alternative frontier history” which argues emphatically that the Comanche were an unrivaled “imperial power” in the Southwest and southern plains for one hundred and fifty years (16). Hamalainen’s thesis of determinative Indian agency in this region goes against the grain of Adelman and Aron’s that Indians did not have comparable empires to Europeans in North America.
Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104:4 (Oct. 1999): 814-841.
John R. Wunder and Pekka Hamalainen, “Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays,” American Historical Review 104:4 (Oct. 1999): 1229-1234.
Evan Haefeli, “A Note on the Use of North American Borderlands,” American Historical Review 104:4 (Oct. 1999): 1229-1234.
Michael Baud, and William Van Schendel. “Toward a Comparative History of the Borderlands.” Journal of World History 8:2 (Fall 1997): 211-242.
In “From Borderlands to Borders” Adelman and Aron suggest that historians should recognize a theoretical 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.” This distinction enables borderland histories to incorporate transnational imperial histories into localized accounts of the actions and decisions of colonial agents and their adversaries. For Adelman and Aron this is an advantage, because not enough borderlands and frontier histories stress the significance and relevancy of conflict and competition between rival imperial European powers. To do so in their view is critical to understand the "shift from inter-imperial struggle to international coexistence turned borderlands into bordered lands." In other words, the emphasis ought to be on inter-imperial struggle and not other factors. By clarifying the meaning of the borderlands in their article, Adelman and Aron hope to theoretically resuscitate the frontier as a term and concept, which had fallen in their view unnecessarily out of fashion because of the imperial stigma attached to it.
Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel arrive at a much different conclusion in “Towards a Comparative History of the Borderlands,” which similarly attempts to construct a conceptual framework for the borderlands. Baud and van Schendel argue against a purely state-centered approach and adopt instead "a cross-border perspective, in which the region on both sides of a border is taken as the unit of analysis." For Baud and van Schendel, social, economic and cultural analyses of the borderlands are as determinative as more traditional state-centered focuses like those advocated by Aron and Adelman.
John Wunder and Pekka Hamalainen offer a blistering critique of Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s “From Borderlands to Borders” in their article, “Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays.” In the article they write that Adelman and Aron’s view of the borderlands as “sanitized, morally neutral” lands where American Indians populations are decimated and “imperial warfare” is prioritized is unacceptable. Wunder and Hamalainen have four major complaints about Adelman and Aron: 1) they advocate process history where Indians are not empires and they reject Limericks’s view of an “unbroken past,” (2) they simplify an “enormously complex historical phenomenon” by emphasizing global colonial rivalries, (3) they “repeatedly downplay the significance of economic relations in politics” and (4) they factor in no Indian agency in their analyses. In the end, Wunder and Hamalainen write that Adelman and Aron’s analyses are critically flawed as they “reject fundamentals of indigenous history”.
Evan Haefeli jumps in the mix too in his “A Note on the Use of North American Borderlands,” criticizing Adelman and Aron for “regrettably” failing “to maintain a consistent distinction between frontier and borderland phenomena.” For Haefeli, Adelman and Aron never answer the crucial question of “what do borderlands do that frontiers do not?” (1222). Haefeli like Wunder and Hamalainen, suggests that Adelman and Aron “make no real effort to answer the question” of “what, if anything, Native American history and historiography can say to the rest of the world” (1223). Haefeli writes that possibly Adelman and Aron, restrained by the traditional box of western history and methodology, are simply “tweaking the familiar old story of American expansion” while retaining “much of the narcissism of Frederick Jackson Turner’s celebratory thesis” (1223).
To conclude, many of the issues Adelman and Aron’s article raised ten years ago continue to be contested to this day. The exact meaning and relevance of the terms borderlands and frontier are such a concern that Pekka Hamalainen in his 2008 work, The Comanche Empire, dedicated pages in its introduction to defending his use of the term frontier. For Hamalainen, the frontier has been “recast as a zone of cultural interpenetration” that is vital for historical analyses: “the history of Indian-Euro relations, as we today understand them, is inseparable from the history of the frontier” (7). In any case, Adelman and Aron deserve kudos for publishing the article ten years ago that inspired much of this debate. Its influence is noticeable in contemporary scholarship, like The Comanche Empire, which is advertised by the author as an “alternative frontier history” which argues emphatically that the Comanche were an unrivaled “imperial power” in the Southwest and southern plains for one hundred and fifty years (16). Hamalainen’s thesis of determinative Indian agency in this region goes against the grain of Adelman and Aron’s that Indians did not have comparable empires to Europeans in North America.
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