The Edge of the Plain
How Borders Make and Break Our World
THE GUARDIAN
The Big Idea: Do Nations Really Need Borders?
In an era of global heating, fixed boundaries may soon be unsustainable. What are the alternatives?
Last November, Simon Kofe, the foreign minister of Tuvalu – a nation formed out of a series of low-lying atolls in the South Pacific – addressed the Glasgow climate conference from a wooden lectern. Exactly what you’d expect at an international summit. Except that the lectern, and Kofe in his suit and tie, were part-submerged by several feet of ocean. In his speech, which had been pre-recorded on location in Tuvalu, he told delegates that his nation was “living the reality” of climate change. “When the sea is rising around us all the time,” he said, “climate mobility must come to the forefront.” . . .
James Crawford, author of "The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break our World," explores how borders have shaped human history and what climate change means for their future.
Why do lines on a map hold such power over humanity? Will we ever do away with them? These are some of the questions pondered - and answered - by James Crawford
CNN AMANPOUR
A world without borders? Author envisions our possible future
In ‘The Edge of the Plain’ James Crawford asks whether good fences really do make good neighbours
What is a border? In “The Edge of the Plain,” James Crawford floats a number of theories. Borders, he writes, are “wellsprings of memory.” A border can be “a story of identity” or a “place at once to be feared and honored.” Sometimes Crawford depicts a border in terms that are both geographical and moral, as “a wound … in the landscape.” Often, borders exist in the realm of metaphor, demarcating “the journey from boy to man,” “the margin … between sanity and madness,” “the very shape of contempt.” In any case, a border “is never simply a line, a marker, a wall, an edge. First, it is an idea.”
For Crawford, a Scottish journalist and broadcaster, a border is almost always a bad idea. “The Edge of the Plain” pulls history, travelogue and reportage into an ambitious investigation of “this vast network of lines … running all over the earth.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Can Borders Work?
Crawford is a historian, publisher, and broadcaster. His new book is “The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World”
Our modern world now has more borderlines than ever before in human history. Not only that, but walls, barriers and fences, and the repressive border policies that go with them, are in clear view across the political, and consequently physical, landscape. At the end of the Cold War, just 12 border walls stood around the globe. Today that figure has risen to 74, with the majority constructed since the beginning of the 2000s. What is becoming less clear, however, is what they are actually dividing.
TIME MAGAZINE
Why borders as we know them won't survive the century to come
TIMES RADIO
James Crawford interviewed by Hugo Rifkind
"We will have to answer the question: when a country disappears, where do those people go?"
Historian, broadcaster and author of ‘The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World’, James Crawford, discusses how borders make and break our world.
A richly essayistic account of how borders make and break our world, from Hadrian’s Wall to China’s Great Firewall
What a border means depends on who you are. The reopening of international borders after Covid lockdowns was hailed as a return to normality, at least for wealthy global travellers. At the same time British politicians, crowing about having “taken back control of our borders” after leaving the EU, set about the surreally punitive wheeze of outsourcing asylum to Rwanda. For the fortunate, a border might be merely a queue at an airport; for those less so, a literal wall between their home and workplace.
THE GUARDIAN
Review: The Edge of the Plain by James Crawford review – beyond borders
In a fascinating new book, the author has a knack for original perspectives and observations about familiar, intransigent problems. By Joshua Keating.
In a recent interview with the Economist, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked how he balances the imperative of protecting as many Ukrainian lives as possible with his government’s stated policy of retaking all Russian-occupied territory, an effort that could entail losing countless more of those lives. Zelensky rejected the premise:
The fact that the people withstood [the invasion] shows that they have a simple truth, and it resides in their family, in their land, in their flag. When they defend the land, it is not something abstract; it is real, it is part of it. Defending the land and the territory means only one thing: to protect life and purpose.
In a moment of reading serendipity, I listened to a recording of Zelensky’s interview just as I was reading the Scottish historian James Crawford’s beguiling new travelogue/history/meditation The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World. Crawford’s reporting and research took place almost entirely before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and he refers to it only in passing, but it’s hard not to think of the war, and the notion that life and territory could be inseparable, when you encounter a statement like “what is a border, if not a story? It is never simply a line, a marker, a wall, an edge. First, it is an idea […] It can only ever be made. It can only ever be told.”
SLATE
Review: A Refreshing Way to Think About Border Wars and Debates
Book review: Scottish historian James Crawford examines geographical and notional divisions. By Oliver Farry.
Borders first emerged as pragmatic limits to a state’s ability to hold territory, and over time morphed into moulds of national imaginaries, even if an echo of the former still lingers. Scottish historian Jame’s Crawford’s The Edge of the Plain examines, in an erudite and engaging fashion, a select number of borders around the world, both geographical and notional.
THE IRISH TIMES
Review: A stimulating study of border regions
Our man-made geographical boundaries are not as permanent as we imagine. James Crawford went on a voyage to trace the dividing lines along which humanity seeks to control the world
You will have seen the news. ‘Chaos’ at the ports of south-east England. Tailbacks running for miles through the Kent countryside from the new ‘hard border’ with the European Union – the cumulative impact of stamping passports to record that a political line is being crossed.
For refugees attempting to travel in the opposite direction, however, that same border has shifted entirely: outsourced to the African nation of Rwanda. The migrants whose boats wash up on the beaches of Dover have not, in official terms at least, crossed a border. Rather the plan is for them to be put on an aeroplane and sent to a border limbo over 4,000 miles to the south: asylum-seeking reduced to a global game of snakes and ladders.
THE BIG ISSUE
Essay: Tracing the lines of a divided planet
BOOKS FROM SCOTLAND
A border is such a simple idea. Step across a line, whether you can see it or not, and you are somewhere else
There are more borders today than ever before, and James Crawford argues that our enduring obsession with borders has brought us to a crisis point, an endgame set in progress thousands of years ago. Read an exclusive abridged extract from The Edge of the Plain below, putting the notion of borders under the microscope.
A border sits on my desk. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I’m always surprised by how light it feels. It’s roughly cuboid in shape. On five sides it’s coarse, bumpy and grey. But on one side it’s smooth, marked with splashes of yellow and orange. I bought this border ten years ago, on eBay. It’s supposed to be a fragment of the Berlin Wall. It’s very likely not. It’s probably just a lump of concrete, scavenged from a building site and daubed with paint. I feel like I can live with this uncertainty . . .