Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 by Charles S. Maier (review)

Charles S. Maier's Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 presents a sweeping intellectual history of territoriality in the early modern and modern worlds. The book probes the conceptualization of territorial boundaries and national borders by rulers, ministers, diplomats, fortress architects, tax reformers, industrialists, economic planners, geographers, and theorists who collaborated in various state projects. Maier argues that "the continuing sociopolitical recourse to territoriality as a dominant mode of establishing the spatial reach of legal regimes for citizenship and property has infused and structured other differential properties of social and cultural organization" (269).

Once within Borders considers the historical construction of the concept of territory: "Territory is not just land, even extensive land. It is global space that has been partitioned for the sake of political authority, space in effect empowered by borders" (1). Territory is both a "decision space" of governance and policy and an "identity space" of loyalties and allegiances (3). Maier argues that "territory is usefully thought of as a domain in which geographic space is ordered by certain rules or properties that are ascribed to it" (7).

The book contrasts the territorial organization of multiethnic empires and emerging nation-states in the early modern period. The "spaces of empires" were always fuzzy, bounded by marches and zones of contact with other cultures, as illustrated by the Mughal Empire's fortress building and the Habsburg-Ottoman military frontier. Fortresses and military cartography also contributed to a new "spaces of states" in the seventeenth century, however. Maier uses scale models of Louis XlV's fortifications to highlight the development of the concept of state borders in the early modern period. Drawing on recent research by Martha Pollak on fortifications and city views, Maier argues that "the citadel testified to the separation of prince and population" (65). Sovereign claims to territory established "state space" through the enclosure of territory by clearly defined borders (80-81). Maier sees modern notions of sovereignty originating before the Peace of Westphalia, most clearly in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, when "complete sovereignty was not under discussion, but its most contested property, mandating religious observation, followed from territorial control" (73). Despite the emergence of state territoriality, "notions of sovereignty also remained intermingled with property rights" (76).

The intellectual field of political economy restructured territoriality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early modern mercantilists conceptualized a national or regional economy as a "territorial unit that continued through time and supported a political and cultural superstructure" (83). Marechal de Vauban's project for a dîme royale provides a key example of how "spatial knowledge … became the prerequisite for rationalizing state resources" (89). The "general crisis" of the seventeenth century destabilized agrarian regimes worldwide, putting new pressure on tax systems. Many states employed cadastral surveys and property claims to survey agricultural lands in the eighteenth century: "The cadaster was the tool of those seeking to systematize the revenue from land—whether for landlords or sovereigns" (100). Tax assessments and maps came to rely on a "territorial precision" that fostered a state rationalization of territory (101). Debates between Physiocrats and Cameralists set the stage for major agrarian labor reforms, such as Emperor Joseph II's abolition of serfdom in the Habsburg Empire: "What the reformers sought was a circumscribed citizenship: a sort of civic participation through productive labor, freed from abusive obligations and allowing access to public courts in cases of disputes" (138).

Colonial empires and global communications placed limits on the imagined control of property and space within states, however. Maier points out that "territory entailed appropriation and control, unequal access, the capacity to create inequality, to accumulate, and to prolong mastery and enable markets" (146). Despite the desire to transform colonial spaces, colonists encountered "incomplete territoriality" in Argentina, Mexico, and other regions (141-142). Russian settlement of the Eurasian steppes and the westward expansion of the United States both showed that land ownership...