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A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a border.
Under General Julio Argentino Roca, the Conquest of the Desert extended Argentine power into Patagonia.
During the Occupation of Araucanía the Republic of Chile advanced the frontier south from Bío Bío River to Malleco River where a well defended line of forts was established between 1861 and 1871.
Having decisively defeated Peru in the battles of Chorrillos and Miraflores in January 1881 Chilean authorities turned their attention to the southern frontier in Araucanía seeking to defend the previous advances that had been so difficult to establish.Bengoa 2000, pp. 275-276.Ferrando 1986, p. 547Bengoa 2000, pp. 277-278. The idea was not only to defend forts and settlements but also to advance the frontier all the way from Malleco River to Cautín River.
Operating in tandem with the doctrine of "manifest destiny", the "frontier" concept also had a massive impact on Native Americans like the declaration of terra nullius enacted by the British around 1835 to legitimize their colonization of Australia. The idea implicitly negated any recognition of legitimate pre-existing occupation and embodied a blank denial of land rights to the indigenous peoples whose territories were being annexed by European colonists.
Throughout American history, the expansion of settlement was largely from the east to the west and so the frontier is often identified with "the West." On the Pacific Coast, settlement moved eastward. In New England, it moved north.
"Frontier" was borrowed into English from French in the 15th century with the meaning "borderland," the region of a country that fronts on another country (see also marches). The use of frontier to mean "a region at the edge of a settled area" is a special North American development. (Compare the Australian "outback".) In the Turnerian sense, "frontier" was a technical term that was explicated by hundreds of scholars.
British, French, Spanish, and Dutch patterns of expansion and settlement were quite different from one another. Only a few thousand French migrated to Canada; the habitants settled in villages along the St. Lawrence River, built communities that remained stable for long stretches, and did not leapfrog west the way that the Americans would. Although French fur traders ranged widely through the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watershed, as far as the Rocky Mountains, they did not usually settle down. Actual French settlement in those areas was limited to a few very small villages on the lower Mississippi and in the Illinois Country.Clarence Walworth Alvord, The Illinois Country 1673-1818 (1918)
Likewise, the Dutch set up fur trading posts in the Hudson River Valley, followed by large grants of land to patroons, who brought in tenant farmers who created compact permanent villages but did not push westward.Arthur G. Adams, The Hudson Through the Years (1996); Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (1987)
In contrast, the British colonies generally pursued a more systematic policy of widespread settlement of the New World for cultivation and exploitation of the land, a practice that required the extension of European property rights to the new continent. The typical British settlements were quite compact and small: under a square mile. Conflict with the Native Americans arose out of political issues on who would rule. Early frontier areas east of the Appalachian Mountains included the Connecticut River Valley.Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (2000) The French and Indian Wars of the 1760s resulted in a complete victory for the British, who took over the French colonial territory west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. The Americans began moving across the Appalachians into areas such the Ohio Country and the New River Valley.
For the next century, the expansion of the nation into those areas, as well as the subsequently-acquired Louisiana Purchase, Oregon Country, and Mexican Cession, attracted hundreds of thousands of settlers. The question of whether the Kansas Territory would become "slave" or "free" helped to spark the American Civil War. In general before 1860, Northern Democrats promoted easy land ownership, and Whigs and Southern Democrats resisted the Homestead Acts for supporting the growth of a free farmer population that might oppose slavery and for depoulating the East.
When the Republican Party came to power in 1860, it promoted a policy of a free land, notably the Homestead Act of 1862, coupled with railroad land grants that opened cheap (but not free) lands for settlers. In 1890, the frontier line had broken up; census maps defined the frontier line as a line beyond which the population was under 2 persons per square mile.
The impact of the frontier in popular culture was enormous, as shown in dime novels, Wild West shows, and after 1910 Western film that were set on the frontier.
The American frontier was generally the edge of settlement in the West and typically was more democratic and free-spirited in nature than the East because of the lack of social and political institutions. The idea that the frontier provided the core defining quality of the United States was elaborated by the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who built his Frontier Thesis in 1893 around the notion.
The Canadian political thinker Charles Blattberg has argued that such events ought to be seen as part of a process in which Canadians advanced a "border," as distinct from a "frontier," from east to west. According to Blattberg, a border assumes a significantly sharper contrast between the civilized and the uncivilized since unlike a frontier process in which the civilizing force is not supposed to be shaped by what it civilizes. Blattberg criticizes both the frontier and the border "civilizing" processes.
Like their American counterparts, the Canadian Prairies supported populist and democratic movements in the early 20th century.Laycock, David. Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945. 1990; Seymour Martin Lipset, Agrarian Socialism (1950).
The transformation of Xinjiang into a Chinese frontier was decisively shaped by the Qing Empire’s military conquest of the Dzungar Khanate in the 18th century, a series of campaigns often referred to as the Dzungar Wars (1687–1757). These brutal wars against the Mongol Buddhism Dzungars—who had built a powerful steppe polity stretching from the Altai to the Ili River—culminated in the near-total destruction of the Dzungar population through warfare, famine, disease, and state-sanctioned mass killings, which some historians characterize as genocidal. Following the conquest, the Qing initiated a large-scale demographic, military, and administrative reordering of the region. Vacated Dzungar lands in the north (Zhunbu) were repopulated with Manchus, Han Chinese, Mongols, and especially Uyghur Muslims from the south (Hui Muslims), laying the foundation for the modern ethno-geographic landscape of Xinjiang. This moment marks the beginning of Xinjiang as an imperial frontier—not just a militarized buffer against Central Asia and Russia, but a zone of active settler colonization, resource extraction, and frontier governance. The Qing’s establishment of garrisons, banner systems, and dual administration over Muslim and nomadic populations illustrates the imperial strategy of managing diversity while extending sovereignty.
United States
In the United States, the frontier was the term applied by scholars to the impact of the zone of land beyond the region of existing European occupation. That is, as pioneers moved into the frontier zone they were changed significantly by the encounter. That is what Frederick Jackson Turner called "the significance of the frontier." For example, Turner argued in 1893, one change was that unlimited free land in the zone was available and thus offered the psychological sense of unlimited opportunity, which in turn had many consequences, such as optimism, future orientation, shedding of restraints caused by land scarcity, and wastefulness of natural resources.
Colonial North America
In the earliest days of European settlement of the Atlantic Ocean Coast, the frontier was essentially any part of the forested interior of the continent beyond the fringe of existing settlements along the coast and the great rivers such as the St. Lawrence, Connecticut, Hudson River, Delaware River, Susquehanna River and James.
American frontier
After victory the American Revolutionary War and the signing Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States gained formal, if not actual, control of the British lands west of the Appalachians. Many thousands of settlers, typified by Daniel Boone, had already reached Kentucky and Tennessee and adjacent areas. Some areas, such as the Virginia Military District and the Connecticut Western Reserve (both in Ohio), were used by the states as rewards to veterans of the war. How to formally include the new frontier areas into the nation was an important issue in the Continental Congress in the 1780s and was partly resolved by the Northwest Ordinance (1787). The Southwest Territory saw a similar pattern of settlement pressure.
Canadian frontier
A Canada frontier thesis was developed by the Canadian historians Harold Adams Innis and J. M. S. Careless, who emphasized the relationship between the center and periphery. Katerberg argues that "in Canada the imagined West must be understood in relation to the mythic power of the North" (Katerberg 2003). Innis's 1930 work The Fur Trade in Canada expounded on what became known as the Laurentian thesis: the most creative and major developments in Canadian history occurred in the metropolitan centres of Central Canada, and the civilization of North America is the civilization of Europe. Innis considered place to be critical in the development of the Canadian West and wrote of the importance of metropolitan areas, settlements, and indigenous people in the creation of markets. Turner and Innis have continued to exert influence over the historiography of the American and Canadian Wests. The Quebec frontier showed little of the individualism or democracy that Turner ascribed to the American zone to the south. The Nova Scotia and Ontario frontiers were more democratic than the rest of Canada, but whether that was caused by the need to be self-reliant on the frontier itself or the presence of large numbers of American immigrants is debated.
Canadian Prairies
The pattern of settlement of the Canadian Prairies began in 1896, when the American Prairies had already achieved statehood. Pioneers then headed north to the "Last Best West."
Before the settlers began to arrive, the North West Mounted Police had been dispatched to the region. When the settlers began to arrive, a system of law and order was already in place, and the Dakotas' lawlessness that was famous for the American "Wild West" did not occur in Canada. The federal government had also sent teams of negotiators to meet with the indigenous peoples of the region. In a series of treaties, the basis for peaceful relations was established, and the long wars with the Natives that occurred in the United States largely did not spread to Canada.
Russia
The expansion of Russia to the north, south (Wild Fields) and east (Siberia, the Russian Far East and Russian Alaska) exploited ever-changing frontier regions over several centuries and often involved the development and settlement of Cossack communities.
9780520230750, University of California Press. . ISBN 9780520230750
China
Xinjiang
Xinjiang in Chinese language literally means "New Frontier" or "New Territory" (), and its previous full name was "Xiyu Xinjiang" (), after Qing dynasty conquered the region in 1759.
Guizhou
Northeast part of Guizhou Province was called "Liangyou Xinjiang" (l=new frontier of two prefectures) in early Qing Dynasty. During the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor (1722–1735), the Qing state undertook a more assertive and systematic effort to incorporate and develop Guizhou, a rugged, mountainous frontier province inhabited largely by non-Han ethnic groups such as the Miao people and Bouyei people. This campaign reflected the broader Qing ambition to solidify imperial authority across its southwestern periphery. Yongzheng implemented the policy of gaitu guiliu (l=replacing chiefs into regular officials), replacing hereditary native chieftains (tusi) with centrally appointed officials in order to strengthen bureaucratic control and undermine semi-autonomous indigenous governance.
See also
Sources
US history
Canada
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