Borders at the global turn

The essay aims to analyse how the topic of borders and border-making fits into the research field of global history. In recent years historicizing borders, avoid its naturalisation, has been recognised as a pivotal point for border studies. Nevertheless, the borders as an object of historical analysis has been just partially investigated, while new studies are currently trying to fill this critical gap. Global history opens a rich research field to study borders in a new perspective, in the light of its theoretical and conceptual framework. In particular, the sensitivity towards the category of space and the firm intent of global history to go beyond methodological nationalism allows a new reading of the historical construction of borders at the pivotal moment between 18th and 19th century. Firstly, the very border-making processes developed in Europe can be released from the narrative of the rising of the nation-state from a top-down perspective in order to be read, in the light of the “spatial turn” principles, as a moment of production of a new space, which social actors took part in, besides the state. Secondly, its interest for regional and transregional spaces can significantly meet concepts of region and ethnographic methods developed by anthropology and geography within the border studies, in order to develop new perspectives on borderlands. Therefore, if the production of 19th-century European sovereign nation states has been associated to the rising of territoriality, the viewpoint of the border-making processes, with its needs for sovereignty and security, unveils how the new boundary lines incorporated a previous way of living space. While, beside the new sovereign state-nation territories, borderlands kept being and further developed as significant spaces, based on social, economic, religious and cultural network. The pivotal element in this methodological proposal is represented by space. Just an awareness of the production of space activated both by border-making processes and by borderlands dynamics can offer an original historical view on borders as made up between 18th and 19th century.