Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700-1700 (Themes in Focus) - Tapa dura

The nine essays in this book seek to answer the questions of what made a "frontier" between the ancient and modern eras, how people imagined their frontiers, and why historians have sometimes had very different ideas of what these frontiers were like. The collection spreads across much of Europe and Asia, familiar frontiers in Western Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea, and includes examples from China, Mesopotamia, and Lithuania. Ranging from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries, the essays challenge us to rethink our modern notions of frontiers as neat lines intended to divide one state from another because frontiers in the past were often far more complex.

Daniel Power is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield.

Naomi Standen is Assistant Professor of Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.