The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, by James Crawford

2022, W.W.Norton & Co.
Barbara Pym (1913-1980)

Borders are in the news these days, and one might ask whether they work and what they’re good for. But first we need to consider the many kinds of borders that exist: our skin is one kind of border, as is the ocean shore, a garden fence, a road that runs along a field. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford visits various kinds of borders, telling stories we may never have heard before, as well as stories we thought we knew.

Starting with the oldest known border marker in the world, between two semi-mythical Sumerian cities, Crawford considers one of the two walls between Roman Britain and the wilds of Scotland, and the herms that once marked a gruesome battle at the frontiers of Sparta, Argos, and Tegea. He visits with the Sami (formerly called Lapps) whose territory, with cherished but unmarked boundaries, now belongs to four countries, and also with some Palestinians facing the wall built by Israel long before the present troubles. In 1819 we had a border with Mexico, later replaced by the 1848 border, but recently marked again by aficionados. A tiny Spanish enclave in Morocco, Melilla, is the desperate goal of

African migrants flinging themselves across its barbed wire fences, often to their deaths. A border between Austria and Italy on an alpine glacier is constantly moving, and in the African Sahel, where the desert is constantly spreading, a few people are trying to plant a wall of trees to defend their land from its invasions. Finally, viruses are constantly trying to cross the walls of cells, as we know to our sorrow.

Crawford is a journalist, not an historian, and though he has read a great many sources, he doesn’t try to locate the events or situations he describes in a wider historical or cultural setting. Still, the different chapters are interesting to read and make one think. If “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” as Robert Frost famously declared, some kinds of walls may be more lovable than others. We can hope for better defenses against viruses, while thinking more carefully about movements of people faced with violence, the ravages of climate change, or the needs of their herds. There must be better solutions than armoring walls one nation at a time, each sitting defiantly in its own silo.