A wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an exploration of their role in shaping our world today.Sincethe earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and thebeginning of the next—a stone column inscribed with Sumeriancuneiform—borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. InThe Edge of the Plain,James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportageto trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe.Whathappens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict howhumans have always lived—and moved? Crawford confronts that questionfrom bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia, to the Sápmi lands ofScandinavia, the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict,efforts to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border, and thedangerous border crossings pursued by migrants into Europe.Andyet the role of borders extends beyond specific sites of conflict. Onthe largest scale, borders define the limits of empire—the two walls inBritain that once represented the northwestern edge of the Roman Empire;the mythological eastern gate supposedly closed off by Alexander theGreat; China’s virtual “Great Firewall.” On the smallest, human scale,cell walls are the last physical barrier against disease, after lines ofquarantine have failed.Finally, asThe Edge of the Plainreveals, humans have not only made their mark on the landscape: thelandscape itself is now changing, more and more rapidly due to climatechange. Crawford introduces us to both the Alpine watershed—one suchshifting, natural borderline—and the “Great Green Wall” in Africa,envisioned as an international, community-built bulwark againstdesertification.Borders are as oldas human civilization, and focal points for today’s colliding forces ofnationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass migration.The Edge of the Plainilluminates these lines of separation past and…