From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality by Kerry Goettlich

Kerry Goettlich challenges a long-standing tendency in international relations to treat linear borders as a natural consequence of territorial sovereignty. His main argument is simple yet significant. Sovereign states do not automatically produce linear borders. That form arises from the practices of delimitation, demarcation, surveying, and mapping, which translate space into technical descriptions, coordinates, markers, and administrative procedures (26–39, 58–60). By separating the history of sovereignty from the history of linearity, Goettlich shifts the focus from legal doctrine to the technical work that enables territories to acquire a stable political form. The historical evidence in this book moves from North America to British India and then to the professionalization of boundary expertise. The case of the thirteen colonies demonstrates that property surveying and intercolonial disputes could drive linearization even before the consolidation of the modern sovereign state (78–79, 102–103). British India provides even stronger evidence. From the late eighteenth century onward, the production of information, surveys, and colonial administration formed a knowledge infrastructure that later underpinned boundary-making in Afghanistan, Persia, and Central Asia (116–117, 136–143). Goettlich also demonstrates how Thomas Holdich, Ellen Churchill Semple, and Lord George Curzon helped transform borders into objects of scientific expertise before the Paris Peace Conference granted experts more direct access to territorial decisions (156–157, 188–197).