Charles S. Maier is Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has written a number of award-winning books, including Recasting Bourgeois Europe, The Unmasterable Past, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, and Once Within Borders.
Charles Maier's new and brilliantly insightful book is a history of
how political borders came to be constructed, contested and—or so
it appeared—effaced, only to revive with a vengeance. Here is a new
and subtle geopolitics for the post-global era of walls and barbed
wire.
*Niall Ferguson, author of Kissinger, 1923–1968*
No other historian of our present age could better this scholarly
discourse upon states, borders, sovereignty, and geographic space
in modern, post-1500 Europe, America, and the world. Professor
Maier's erudition results in a fabulous, original work on what land
and sea borders have meant, and still do mean, to governments and
peoples, and to state and non-state actors. His easy discussion
with some of the greatest European and American public thinkers,
geopoliticians, historians, and philosophers is breathtaking.
*Paul Kennedy, author of Engineers of Victory*
A brilliant synthesis of a wealth of empirical material about the
birth and development of what is conventionally considered to be
modernity.
*Geoff Eley, author of Nazism as Fascism*
In this brilliant and sweeping narrative, Maier shows how,
beginning in the seventeenth century, sovereignty and territory
became intertwined as states built borders, reorganized systems of
labor and capital, and forged domains of law and authority…Maier
finds today’s world awash in fast-changing and deeply conflicting
ideas about territory. The
interdependence of economies and the emergence of cyberspace seem
to have reduced the salience of physical territorial control and
weakened traditional notions of sovereignty and citizenship. But if
Maier is correct, territory will continue to claim an important
place in the human imagination.
*Foreign Affairs*
It’s rare to find insightful contemporary political commentary in
what is primarily a history book. Yet this tome could hardly be
more timely. For anyone keen to understand the mass movements that
fuelled everything from the EU referendum result to Trump’s
election victory, you could do far worse than have a flick through
Once Within Borders, exploring how the tinderbox where these
particular fires caught ablaze came into existence.
*Geographical*
Charles Maier’s Once Within Borders is a splendid account of the
changing notions of territory over the past five centuries. Maier
is among the most distinguished living historians and this timely
book has been years in the making…He shows how changing
geopolitics, the advent of commercial society, rise of industrial
technology and development of new techniques of governance impinged
upon evolving the notions of territory.
*Mint*
Charles Maier ask[s] us to consider afresh the commonplace
intellectual and experiential twinning of history and geography, of
time and space, and by doing so open[s] up compelling new avenues
for historical, geographical and social-scientific inquiry…A
stimulating analysis of the history of territory as a concept.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Maier’s book is a timely reminder that borders go back much farther
than debates about border walls and hard borders…Maier shows how
borders contributed to the creation of polities and our ideas about
them, including sovereignty, in a sweeping review of the past 500
years of western history.
*International Affairs*
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