Sublime

To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory. The revolution had been fought by a union of states, but those states’ borders became ill-defined and even overlapped as they reached westward. Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which no

Geographic frontiers are what we tend to think of when frontiers are invoked: the vast unspoiled vistas, the abundant and yet uncounted resources. All of the New World—North and South America, the Caribbean, and every island near the coasts—was a vast geographic frontier for the Beringians.

The forward move on to the American continent was the work not of princes or capitalists at home in Europe, but of gold-hungry frontiersmen spurred on by the rapid exhaustion of the islands’ deposits. Without the short-lived gold rush on the Caribbean islands and the nearby Tierra Firme, the impetus towards the territorial conquest of the mainland

The primary role of a Chinese emperor was to safeguard the frontier against the nomadic irruptions that threatened to wreck (physically and politically) his complex agrarian world.

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

Today, there are four possibilities for the frontier: the land, the internet, the sea, and space. If we assess where we are right now, we learn that currently 7.7B people are on land, 3.2B on the internet, about 2–3M on the high seas, and fewer than 10 in space.

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.