The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World

A wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an examination of their role in shaping our world today.

Since  the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the  beginning of the next—a stone column inscribed with Sumerian  cuneiform—borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In  The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel  writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history  and across the globe: from bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia,  to the battlegrounds of ancient Greece, the Sápmi lands of Scandinavia,  the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the drawing of  America’s Mason-Dixon Line, the dangerous border crossings pursued by  migrants into Europe, and the “Great Green Wall” in Africa, envisioned  as an international, community-built bulwark against desertification.

Borders  are as old as human civilization and focal points for today’s colliding  forces of nationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass  migration. The Edge of the Plain illuminates lines of separation past  and present, how we define them—and how they define us.