Frontiers are "wild." The frontier is a zone of interaction between distinct polities, peoples, languages, ecosystems and economies, but how do these frontier spaces develop? If the frontier is shaped by the policing of borders by the modern-nation state, then what kind of zones, regions or cultural areas are created around borders?

This book provides 14 different case studies of frontiers in Asia and Latin America by interdisciplinary scholars, charting the first steps toward a transnational and transcontinental history of social development in the borderlands of two...