Introduction: The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history

The concept of the frontier has been central to many recent studies of settler colonialism. In Patrick Wolfe's work, the frontier constitutes the “primal” settler/indigenous binary that structures and belies the ostensible commitment of settler societies to multicultural pluralism. While Wolfe thus calls attention to the role the “frontier binary” plays in the “logic of elimination,” he has also criticized the frontier as a representational trope that works to memorialize and whitewash settler invasion. In contemporary historiographic debates in the fields of western and borderlands history within the USA, the concept of the frontier has fared much differently. For US scholars, the very word frontier is irrevocably linked to the legacy of historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), who, in his 1893 essay “The Significance of The Frontier in American History,” cast the frontier as both a moving line of settlement and the well-spring of American individualism and democracy. Today, US scholars reject Tur...