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This chapter details the diplomacy and warfare that led to the determination of the location of the boundary line and the trying process through which the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission attempted to survey and mark the boundary on the ground. In delimiting the border, U.S. and Mexican officials imagined that they could easily separate sovereign space. However, the process of delimiting, or drawing, the boundary line on paper, simple as it may seem, was the culmination of decades of conflict and diplomatic negotiation. The difficulties faced by the boundary commission not only impeded the commissioners' work, but also fundamentally challenged the national sovereignty under which they operated. The discrepancy between the ability of the nation-states to delimit the boundary line in the treaty and to demarcate it on the ground marked the beginning of a long history in which the border would repeatedly reveal the divide between the states' aspirations and their actual power.

This chapter looks in detail the various demands placed by leading political parties on how the border should drawn once the decision to partition had been taken. In addition it looks at petitions from local civic bodies and individuals, both Hindus and Muslims on where and why they perceived the border should be drawn. The chapter argues that although the border was central to the Partition process, it was undermined by several factors beyond the control of the parties involved. The very basis of the task involving religious demography was bound to fail and ultimately the Boundary Award failed to please anyone. However, the debates surrounding the Award shows us that rather than being passive bystanders or communally guided ideologues, the Bengali public felt and expressed a desire not only to be a part of the decision process but also to be able to claim a stake in their political futures.

Environmental historian Mary Mendoza’s chapter explores the riverine border between Mexico and the United States. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo called forth the International Boundary Commission to establish and mark the border separating the two republics. The commissioners, however, found a challenging type of nature along the Rio Grande, neither fully concrete nor fully imagined, but instead always shifting. Between the two nations, she argues, the political border was neither as visible nor as fixed as maps suggested. Even with later efforts to channelize the river, or to control its path through technology and infrastructure, the nature in this story remained dynamic and chaotic. The Rio Grande moved, complicating territoriality and sovereignty and undermining efforts to plat it cartographically. Statecraft, or the effort to permanently define and separate national spaces, proved elusive.

This chapter details the failed efforts to define the boundary with China despite two successive boundary commissions. A boundary consciousness never receded from the minds of the authorities in London, Calcutta, and Simla. There was also the fear of the Russian expansion. This consciousness was fed by the surveys, launched with official approval, and by the need to print official maps of the region, now that it was under British suzerainty. Relations with China, moreover, were not to be put at risk either by ignorance of the border zones or the foolhardiness of Kashmir's Maharaja. Security problems also pressed themselves for decision.

The chapter presents a multi-scalar account of the uses of ethnographic mapping to negotiate the Estonian-Latvian state border in the aftermath of the First World War. Focusing on the period between 1919-1920, it examines the interactions between Estonian and Latvian government representatives, the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission, and the efforts of local inhabitants to influence the outcome of the bordering process. The chapter offers a novel bottom-up perspective on bordering processes by examining the written petitions and maps drawn by border region dwellers to inform, correct, and challenge decisions about nationality, property ownership, and boundary-drawing made by the boundary commission. The inhabitants of the border region deployed considerable cartographic literacy to make specific claims about where they believed borders ought to be located and why. The development of cartographic thinking and the production of maps over the course of the nineteenth century, which had circulated in schoolbooks and newspapers, spread cartographic literacy among broad elements of the Baltic populations. The very subjects of ethnographic cartography themselves became mapmakers and consequently agents in the border drawing process. This chapter further demonstrates how ethnographic mapping permeated multiple levels of society and impacted thinking about territory and nationhood.

Master Tara Singh issued a statement on 4 June that the 3 June Plan did not give ‘any power or status’ to the Sikhs or anything ‘safeguarding their position or interests’. The ultimate acceptance of the plan, he said, would depend on the terms of reference for the Boundary Commission. A cycle of retaliation and reprisal started before 15 August 1947 as a prelude to an unprecedented exodus in world history. Giani Kartar Singh was thinking of reorganization of the East Punjab to form ‘a Sikh majority province’, including the princely states of the plains. But Nehru was opposed to any kind of political safeguards. His vision of India after Independence had little room for the long-cherished hopes and aspirations of the Akalis.

This chapter demonstrates how the mapping of a Luso-Hispanic border in the Río de la Plata transformed territorial practices. Following the boundary commissions, colonial officials sought to populate the border with migrants from the Azores and Canary Islands or from the Guarani missions. They promoted sedentism, private property rights, and well-regulated commercial practices, which dovetailed with broader Bourbon and Pombaline Reforms. Spanish officials undertook extermination campaigns against tolderías, while Portuguese officials made frequent pacts with Charrúa and Minuán caciques. Tolderías’ experiences of these efforts derived from their territorial positioning. Those furthest from the border found themselves bereft of the economic and political benefits of competing imperial foes, while those closest to the border were able to take advantage of imperial border-making initiatives.

The 1925 Irish Boundary Commission was a doomed attempt to iron out some of the border’s political, economic, and geographic anomalies. This was a time of transition, when the prospect of further changes continued to coexist with those recently wrought by partition. The commissioners interviewed more than five hundred witnesses on the written statements they had been invited to submit in advance. The submissions and the testimony offer insights into how the border was perceived and its impact in the years immediately following its creation. They reveal the tensions and conflicts that both shaped and blurred the boundary, between the impact and consequences of the border on one side and, on the other, those older frameworks of power, space, and history that it modified, absorbed, or displaced. Using the Boundary Commission records, this chapter considers that collision through two of their central themes—the interrelated references to space and time.

Colonel John George Vaughan Hart resided in his large ancestral home of Kildery (Muff, Co. Donegal) during the partition of Ireland. This chapter highlights the experiences of a Southern Unionist who found himself on the wrong side of the border and explores the possible reasons as to why the Colonel decided to move a few miles, to Londonderry, to a simpler home. The chapter draws primarily on Hart’s carbon copy letter books which have been deposited at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. The seventy letter books comprise a small part of a much larger Hart family collection. 

Chapter 9 follows the Canada–US border’s development from 1900 until the 1930s. It surveys the Alaska Boundary Survey, World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and Indigenous resistance to new immigration laws. In the 1920s, the Indian Citizenship Act and National Origins Act extended federal immigration law over Indigenous people, resulting in resistance. Deskaheh (Levi General) gave speeches in Europe to garner support for the Haudenosaunee rights to self-governance. Clinton Rickard helped found the Indian Defense League of America to increase pan-Indigenous resistance to federal policy. Paul Diabo’s legal challenge to the Immigration Service’s interpretation of the Jay Treaty helped entrench Indigenous mobility as a fundamental part of the Canada–US border. As battles over citizenship and prohibition attested, increases in federal personnel did not give either country the ability to ignore popular resistance.

The British Prime Minister’s statement of 20 February 1947 carried the implication of partition with independence by June 1948. Nehru welcomed the statement as ‘wise and courageous’ and the Congress Working Committee welcomed the declaration, adding that Sikh interests would be safeguarded. Master Tara Singh declared that there could be no settlement if the Muslims wanted to rule over the Punjab. Lord Mountbatten was prepared to work out a settlement on the basis of partition. In his meeting with the Governor General and the representatives of the Congress and the Muslim League on 2 June, Baldev Singh accepted partition in principle, suggesting exchange of population and property as the terms of reference for the Boundary Commission. Mountbatten made it clear at a press conference later that the Labour Government would never subscribe to partition on the basis of landed property. Thus, population became virtually the sole criterion for partition.