Spaces of mobility spinning around Asian steppes and southern seas expanded at a walking and sailing pace for many centuries, increasing in scale and volume, little by little, then accelerating after 1200 and 1500, and much faster after 1850. During the very long expansion of social space, more people in more places travelled and scattered over greater distances; they became ever more interconnected, as more different kinds of people intermingled, intermarried, and settled in more mixed environments, and humans took more control over their own natural environments.
Increasing mobility enabled more people to invest more energy and assets in territorial power, which as it expanded spatially became more complex and multi-layered, forming imperial spaces that channeled mobility, provided security for people on the move, and increased human control over people and nature. Impassioned attachments to particular places developed inside imperial territory, where increasing mobility always challenged territorial stability. As a result, spatial history became a shifting kaleidoscope filled with multiple overlapping, contending geographies, sensibilities, ideologies, histories, and power relations, which eventually covered the globe, forming the world we live in.
Today’s maps conceal that kaleidoscope in the iron cage of static national state boundaries, while mobility increasingly accelerates and ever more people and things travel farther and faster to meet everyday local needs. Territorial powers and identities are also traveling, shifting, and mingling across national borders, exceeding, fracturing, and eluding state space. Migration, displacement, refugees, businesses, and imperial adventures form shifting, mobile spaces. Countless transnational and multinational organizations span borders tackling problems that afflict and elude nations. Yet all this spatial mobility is hidden by static state maps, which promote the illusion that national borders define social space everywhere.
National state boundaries that now substantially control ideas about historical space are contingent products of spatial history. That contingency becomes visible when we establish a vantage point for historical studies outside the nation, following advice from William Appleman Williams, “… leaving the present … going back into the heretofore … beginning again….” to see territories emerging inside expanding spaces of mobility. For as he says,
The historical experience is not one of staying in the present and looking back. Rather it is one of going back into the past and returning to the present with a wider and more intense consciousness of the restrictions of our former outlook. We return with a broader awareness of the alternatives open to us and armed with a sharper perceptiveness with which to make our choices. In this manner, it is possible to loosen the clutch of the dead hand of the past and transform it into a living tool for the present and future. (The Contours of American History, New York: Norton, 1988, pp.19-20).
History inside the nation depicts territories that prefigure the nation. That makes good sense, because modern ideas about history evolved inside national frames of spatial understanding, where history proceeds from ancient times to the present in one territory after another, until nations absorb all history. Boundary lines that organize historical space today prescribe modern ways to see the past in the world of nations.
By leaving the present, however, we can leave the nation. That is easy in Asia, because pre-modern histories are vast and remain vital in spatial discourse today. Traveling old historical spaces, we find new perspectives on spatial history: we see that mobile spaces made by nomads, sailors, warriors, frontier and fishing folk, migrants, travelers, farmers, traders, investors, pilgrims, missionaries, and others – have jostled with he territorial power of of kingdoms, empires, and states, which define historical space in strictly territorial terms.
Territorial prejudices built into modern knowledge production provide cultural ballast for national states sailing unruly seas of mobile turbulence. Modern thought describes social space as being contained by boundaries, when social life is actually always on the move. The so-called sedentary societies are never immobile: mobility is essential; the boundaries are always imposed by territorial authorities, including historians. People are constantly moving around, often moving away, settling elsewhere, forming various degrees of spatial attachment and detachment. Territorial cultures valorize rootedness, origins, indigeneity, and homelands; they promote emotional, moral, and political ties to particular places that seem most intense where they are soaked in nostalgia in mobile spaces where localities are bundled into larger and larger territories, homelands for investments of emotional attachment: the national state is merely one of those homelands.
History that focuses intead on mobility reveals that constructing larger and larger territories of belonging and identity requires ever more expansive control over mobility, using a range of technologies to contain mobile spaces where people move to greener pastures, follow opportunity, flee harm, and rebuild lives here and there, adapting to change, animating spatial history, transforming territories, challenging borders, and dramatizing limits of territorial order.
Newspapers are filled with territorial struggles to control mobile migrants, refugees, workers, investors, assets, armies, and pathogens. Mobility propelled by climate change and inequities of globalization are visibly reshaping human geography. History can help us to rethink our way into a mobile future by following William Appleman Williams’ advice, going back into the past to explore the ways that mobility and territorial power have interacted and transformed one another, over time. We can thus begin to historicize future territorial possibilities in the world of nation. {Intro3] [Pandemic Space]
