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This work examines the geo-archaeological landscape around Hadrian's Wall, one of Rome's best-preserved frontiers, and the only monument of its kind in Great Britain. Within the area surrounding Hadrian's Wall, over 500 sandstone, limestone and dolerite quarries are recorded in modern mapping (BRITPITS 2020). This large number represents the complex and changing use of the landscape surrounding the Wall. Over the last two millennia, this region has seen Roman invasion and settlement, medieval monastic building, major agricultural land-use, military road construction, and the growth of two cities. It was necessary to understand the entire history of the region in order to establish which of the many quarries may have been associated with the Roman Wall, due to very limited changes in quarrying techniques up to the modern era. At this time, only seven of the hundreds of quarries have been identified as Roman due to inscriptions left by the quarrymen. Looking at land-use, historical mapping and industrial and pre-industrial quarrying methods has allowed a categorisation of the quarries to suggest which, if any, of the undated sites are the most likely to be associated with the Roman Wall. A gazetteer of 152 of the quarries has been produced which includes all the data gathered for this research. In addition to gathering data on the quarry sites, this research also attempted the largest scale petrological testing programme ever completed along Hadrian's Wall. Ninety-three samples were taken in total, thirty-seven samples from archaeological remains and fifty-six quarry samples. Samples have been taken from Chesters Roman Fort, Birdoswald Roman Fort, Housesteads Roman Fort, Corbridge Roman Town, Carlisle Castle, and from thirteen quarries and five control locations. Loose powder XRF, and thin-section microscopy were used to identify links between the archaeological sites and potential stone sources, and the results show promising results which align well with long held historical expectations.

The Spanish colonisation of the Philippines in 1565 opened up trade between China, Latin America and Europe via the Pacific crossing, changing the history of global trade forever. The traditional understanding of the early colonial period in the Philippines suggests that colonial control spread rapidly and peacefully across the islands, ushering in dramatic changes to the social, political and economic environment of the archipelago. This dissertation argues by contrast that the extent of Spanish control has been overstated - partially as a by-product of an over-reliance on religious and secular chronicles that sought to magnify the role and interests of the colonial state. Through extensive archival work examining different sites of colonial authority and power, I demonstrate that Philippine communities contested and limited the nature of colonisation in their archipelago. In making this argument, I challenge prevalent assumptions of indigenous passivity in the face of imperial expansion. By demonstrating the agency of Southeast Asians, particular actors come to the fore in each of the chapters: Chinese labourers, indigenous elites, fugitives and apostates, unpacified mountain communities, native priestesses and Moro slave raiders. The culture and social organisation of these Southeast Asian communities impacted on the nature of Spanish imperialism and the capacity for the Spanish to retain and extend their control. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Spanish presence within the archipelago was always tenuous. A number of communities remained outside of Spanish control for the duration of the century, while still others oscillated between integration and rebellion, by turns participating in and resisting the consolidation of empire. These communities continued to maintain their local and regional economies and customs. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, imperial control remained fragmented, partial and incomplete. The dissertation contributes not only to the historiography of the Philippines - which remains under-explored - but also to the historiographies of Colonial Latin America, Southeast Asia and early modern empires. Conceptualising the Philippines as a frontier space helps to overturn the foundations of the myth of a completed conquest. This dissertation thus raises questions about the inevitability of empire by arguing that indigenous communities were active respondents to Spanish colonisation attempts and that indigenous traditions and culture in this region were both resilient and enduring in the face of colonial oppression.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Himalaya were finally being recognised as the highest mountains on the globe. Simultaneously, they were becoming the insecure northern frontier of the East India Company's burgeoning Indian empire. This thesis examines the scientific, political and imaginative understandings of the Himalaya that emerged from this context. It traces two overlapping sets of arguments through the mountains. Firstly, it examines the laboriousness of scientific practice in the high spaces of the Himalaya, and the inherent dependency of European surveyors and naturalists on pre-existing networks of labour and expertise. Secondly, it details the role of global comparison in the rise of verticality as a framework for understanding both human and nonhuman worlds. The thesis consists of five thematic chapters, each of which deals with a different type of science: measurement, physiology, geology, botany, and biogeography. By addressing a range of interrelated sciences rather than focusing on only one, it becomes possible to explain how the mountains became both spaces and subjects of scientific practice. Methodologically, the five chapters do so by examining the practical aspects of doing science in remote and often topographically challenging locations. They concentrate especially on the moments that instruments, bodies and practices broke down, which are revealing of the social relationships that underpinned the knowledge they produced. A close focus is also maintained on everyday interactions between travellers and their guides (especially Bhotiya, Tartar, and Lepcha), which often highlight the limits of imperial mastery. Tracing the reconfiguration of these networks and practices ultimately reveals the many ways that the mountains were rendered as marginal spaces in this period in relation to lowland norms. More broadly, this thesis demonstrates the value of using geographical features as sites and scales for histories that transcend traditional national and area studies framings. By placing mountains at the centre of the analysis, it shows that travellers in the Himalaya were constantly measuring their experiences against expectations arising from the Alps and the Andes. It thus offers a methodology for examining the formation of what were inherently both sciences of the globe and global sciences in practice. At the same time, it shows that these global comparisons could be contradictory, often only adding to scientific and imperial uncertainties. Ultimately, this thesis thus argues that we need to pay attention to disconnection as much as connection in the making of supposedly global categories in the nineteenth century.

The fullest and most comprehensive unpacking of the term finis has yet to be achieved. Studies have narrowly focussed on the idea of border, boundary or frontier, without even entertaining the prospect of interpreting the study from the ancient point of view. This investigation considers the use of the word finis in Livy and attempts to recreate a conception of finis which mirrors as closely as possible that of a Roman of the Republic up to the very Early Empire. Besides the remarkably high usage of the term by Livy, the author’s work is also useful due to its chronological nature, which allows for broad investigation throughout the Republican Period, as well as shedding light on the Early Imperial concept of finis. The main aim of this dissertation is to provide a collective analysis of diverse cases, which together can help build a complete picture of the detectable features related to the term finis. As well as this, the analysis of the contexts – in which the term finis is used has also cast light on those features of finis – that have remained fixed despite the different historical contexts in which they appear. For example, throughout my study, two fundamental concepts will continue to pop up in front of the reader’s eyes: a) the inapplicability of modern conceptual categories to the idea of finis and b) finis – if translated as border, boundary or frontier – as a concept applicable not to a line, but to a spatial element. On the basis of Livy’s evidence – drawn from his work Ab Urbe Condita – this study attempts to present a reconstruction of the term through the identification of an entirely new concept. This study is conceived in terms of a crescendo, which begins with the basic definitions attached to finis and evolves, adding an increasing number of evidences until it reaches a climax, whereby the reader can see both those invariable features of finis in Livy’s account and the 4 Introduction: Research guidelines evolution of the term as fines are applied within different political contexts. Rome – a city that rose on a finis, the Tiber River – reinvented or remodelled the concept of finis, demonstrating behaviour antithetical to the notion of confining herself behind a ‘single line’. Once identified as a finis, the natural features helped the Romans to exert their imperium, which was itself an embodiment of the features contained within the concept of finis. The establishment of the fines provided an ‘imaginary’ subdivision of the territory subjected to the Roman imperium in a series of land strips. This is documented by Livy through Rome’s expansionist ‘finis-system’, from a single occupation of the Janiculum Hill to the scientific approach and setting of the treaty of Apamea. Although the lacunae in Ab Urbe Condita – from 168 B.C. onwards – do not permit a direct connection between the Late Republic and the Early Empire, some elements can be used to evidence an intimate relationship between Livy’s and Augustus’ thinking and terminology. To some extent, this common intent has made possible this attempted reconstruction of the ‘bordering practices’ used in the last 150 years of the Republic, as well as the possible evolution of such practices in the first 150 about years of the Empire.

This thesis analyses a series of threshold states located within contemporary culture. It investigates the effects of technology on spatial relations and human conditions in recent centuries, with a specific interest in the rise of virtual phenomena and the ongoing process of virtualisation. Key to the discussion is measuring the extent to which America and its narratives have influenced the virtual layer attached to contemporary global technological culture. Prevalent within this framework is the idea of the frontier as an idealised outpost, a lingering threshold state that is scrutinised in terms of its metaphoric power and socio-historical relevance. The research examines the points of interaction between the frontier, the virtual, and recent technology, as well as the areas in which technology has been produced, distributed, and consumed, as a means of building on ‘virtual frontiers’ and the ‘technological state’ as original critical concepts. Chapter one, from a socio-cultural and historical perspective, develops the idea of California as the location where the frontier spirit dispersed, transferring to an extent from land to body. Rich in posthuman ambience, the state functions as a hub from which to negotiate the position of the body in relation to the frontier: to look at the body as a frontier in itself, its virtualisation, and the now perennial dialectic between the positive and negative effects of technology on human/non-human interactivity. From the ashes of the 1960s, pockets of urban youth living in America’s inner cities gave birth to a subculture that is now globally recognised as Hip Hop. Despite Hip Hop always being a potent reflective surface, chapter two assesses its development and continuing capacity as a virtual and technological form of expression. In the decades between Malcolm X’s assassination and the election of President Obama, how has Hip Hop changed as a virtual arena and mode of resistance, as it has simultaneously been incorporated into the American mainstream? Indeed, as a cultural object and virtual space with the potential to carry evocative messages across thresholds, did Hip Hop even survive this transition? And what were the ramifications of its transformation? The third chapter examines the shadows emanating from the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001. The narratives from 9/11 are considered while investigating a diverse selection of transnational texts that touch on the subject, including works from Don DeLillo, Amy Waldman, Martin Amis, and Frédéric Beigbeder. Also considered is the day’s social and historical significance, and its power as a virtual event. More specifically, the impact on time, perception, and narrative structure is observed, each element appearing in the shadows that stretch out from the decades before and beyond the events of that clear blue September morning. Through characters in recent fiction by William Gibson and Hari Kunzru, the final chapter scans American consumption and the representations projected out from its brands and advertising. Within technological states now transmitted globally, the chapter reflects on the consequences of consumer culture as we venture further into the virtual and its realities, drawn through what Jean Baudrillard calls an irreconcilable conflict between ‘total integration’ and the ‘dual form’.

Order and the Underground uses a political ecology approach to examine local-level governance institutions in Madagascar’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector in order to better understand natural resource governance in frontier settings—that is, in spaces resting at the margins of state authority. In doing so, it aims to answer three principal questions: First, how—that is, through what institutions and processes—are ASGM sites governed in Madagascar? Second, what historical, political-economic, socio-natural conditions have shaped these institutions and processes over time and across space? Third and finally, why and how do different actors navigate local-level institutions and governance landscapes so as to contest and/or claim authority, control, access, and/or autonomy? The arguments that emerge in response are based on data from more than 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Madagascar between 2015 and 2018; from semi-structured interviews with stakeholders across the gold economy; from archival documents housed in Madagascar’s national archives in Antananarivo; and from existing historical work, media accounts, and policy and project reports.Between one and two million Malagasy earn their livelihoods through gold mining, working deposits spread across the length of the island. Globally, ASGM employs at least 40 million people, and represents between 20 and 30 percent of global gold production. Despite its economic import, policymakers and popular media view ASGM as a problem to be solved, as a sector beset by social and environmental ills emanating from its characteristic informality and illegality. State-corporate actors, meanwhile, depict ASGM sites as chaotic landscapes devoid of or deficient in regulation, and design or prescribe interventions—often violent suppression or top-down formalization—accordingly. Contrary to such portrayals, I find that resource access and extractive activities in diggings across Madagascar are regulated, and order maintained, through local-level institutions. These institutions are conditioned, first and foremost, by the frontier context in which they operate. From at least the mid-1800s, Madagsacar’s gold economy has been shaped by a persistent set of frontier dynamics, including its informal character and imbrication with illicit trade networks; fragmented or plurified regulatory authority in ASGM sites; and miners’ resistance to elements of capitalist expansion like enclosure, technological complexification, and labor rigidification. Under such circumstances, varied stakeholders—state-corporate actors, ASGM operators, local leaders, and mining communities—have acted as territorializing agents, aiming to advance competing claims to access and authority, gold deposits and autonomy.The resulting governance landscape comprises a range of frontier institutions used for local-level management of ASGM. In Madagascar, these include (1) extended pre-existing customary institutions, (2) syncretic institutions (or adapted, top-down impositions); and (3) bricolage institutions (or novel, bottom-up constructions). These forms often coexist in overlapping, complementary, and/or competitive contexts of regulative pluralism—something I demonstrate through in-depth ethnographic explorations of three cases: Sandrazaha, Antanimbary, and Betsiaka. An important corollary to this analysis is the realization that Malagasy mining communities often conceptualize and manage goldfields as mineral commons, or collectively-held resources where exclusion is largely impracticable for both socio-cultural and techno-geological reasons. In doing so, they explicitly reject the claims made by the government and its corporate partners to exclusive state ownership of subsoil resources. This is not to say that gold diggings are naturally or inevitably commons, but that they have been produced as such over time, and are maintained as such now to varying degrees in different areas under contingent and uneven circumstances.To develop a fuller sense of where frontier institutions governing ASGM sites come from, what conditions shape their emergence and form, and how they are used to advance diverging interests, I interrogate dynamics in Betsiaka, one of the island’s best-known, longest-worked, most-productive mining regions. I trace institutional emergence, extension, evolution, and endurance in Betsiaka from the late 1800s to the present day, identifying critical conjunctural moments in which global trends, national programs, and local socio-natural, political-economic particularities have articulated to produce the governance landscape we see today. A significant component of ASGM governance Betsiaka is its gold mining Dina and the institutional complex or assemblage in which it is embedded. Dina are codified set of rules, regulations, and penalties elaborated and adopted by local communities—an element of so-called customary law in Madagascar. Conditions influencing the processes of bricolage through which the Dina institutional complex has been constructed in Betsiaka include (1) the geological context of gold in the region, and the associated socio-technical practices of extraction used in response; (2) significant in-migration of miners from different regions of the country, and the resultant local heterogeneity; (3) the discursive and material legacies of the local mining community’s formative experiences with interventions by external (state, corporate, and NGO) actors, which have played a significant role in motivating the production of local goldfields as commons; and (4) an oppositional and confrontational orientation towards the political center (and Highland Merina authority), which has driven the mining community’s use of institution-building as a form of territorialization against state-corporate hegemony.Finally, I explore the ways in which different actors navigate Betsiaka’s institutional landscape in pursuit of varying objectives through a close analysis of the apara (share) system, and through a series of vignettes illustrating the diggings five conflict strata. I show how political and economic elites (as well as some non-elite ASGM operators) work to manipulate labor and revenue-distribution arrangements and dispute resolution processes to dominate and exploit mining laborers. At the same time, mining laborers and the mining community more broadly use those same institutions, arrangements, and processes to resist domination and exploitation, to maintain resource access, to protect the integrity of the mineral commons, and to preserve local autonomy. Despite the persistence of corruption and exploitation, then, the rise and reign of Betsiaka’s Dina institutional complex and the community’s ongoing defense of its collectively-managed goldfields proffers an example of how local-level institutions of governance and the conceptualization of mineral resources as commons can create opportunities for resistance, and can aid in the production of ASGM sites as spaces of locally-organized order and autonomy.

This thesis examines the historical-geographical processes that led to the marginalization of a rural underclass in Uruguay and to the formation of rural informal settlements, or rancher�os. In doing so, it brings forth three main ideas. The first is that of the pastoral city-state as a metaphor for the excessive centrality of Montevideo in a territory dominated by extensive livestock raising. The second and third look at the makings of rural marginality and the gradual transformation of Uruguay’s rural proletariat from semi-nomadic gauchos to sedentary peons as the result of the closing of two frontiers; a spatial frontier in the colonial period, and a technological frontier in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In both cases, the intensification of land use resulted in the consolidation of Montevideo’s primacy.

Depuis le XIIe siècle, la Basse-Navarre est associée au Royaume de Navarre et le sera jusqu’en 1527. Après la Conquête et son incorporation à la Castille (1512-1515), elle sera abandonnée. Pendant quatre siècles, il faut souligner la forte présence – en nombre et importance – de lignées originaires de cette région à la cour de Navarre. Les plus remarquables parviendront à s’apparenter à la famille royale, participant dans le gouvernement et à la défense du territoire. Leur vie sera rattachée à la défense de la frontière et aux missions diplomatiques dans différents royaumes européens. Cet article porte sur une de ces lignées, les Lizarazu. En divisant la cour en deux bandes irréconciliables (1451), leur destin sera rattaché à celui du prince Carlos de Viana. Leur défaite ira de pair avec l’hispanisation de la lignée et l’abandon de leurs bases au nord des Pyrénées.

This dissertation explores a period between the 1570s and 1620s when the Audiencia of Charcas (Modern Bolivia) was beset with problems. During this time, the Eastern Andean frontier emerged as an idealized space where the chaotic social elements that plagued Charcas, both within and without, might be more effectively placed under royal authority. The discovery and exploitation of resources in the Viceroyalty of Peru, particularly silver mines, had set in motion new patterns of human migration and mixture that would fill Spain’s Peruvian cities with a rabble that some would parse as la gente suelta: the Empire’s loose or lost peoples. This growing throng, including ambitious immigrants and disaffected children of the conquistadores, seemed to threaten the fragile order that Spanish officials had established. Moreover, Spanish control of Peru remained incomplete and tenuous. Just east of Potosi, raids of the Chiriguano and other unconquered indigenous groups crippled the development of the region’s emerging agrarian hinterland. In the frontier, idealized cities and their jurisdictions were seen as sites where royal authorities would knit together the region’s growing Spanish and mixed-race transient population, fugitive African and indigenous slaves and servants, and unconquered peoples, into an orderly republic, a community bound together under the rule of law. Over six chapters, this dissertation explores how a diverse set of actors applied Iberian ideas about vagrancy, urban planning, racial difference, and frontier geopolitics to the specific conditions of Potosí and its eastern hinterlands. I find that royal officials and prospective city founders often weighed the social reputation of frontier settlers against the realities of recruitment, allowing for social mobility by people of African descent. Unlike previous studies, which have analyzed either tensions within Potosí itself or Spain’s often violent relationships with unconquered peoples, this dissertation redefines the Eastern Andes as a contested internal space, shaped by the localized aspirations of the many people who strove to possess the region’s land and resources. In the frontier, low-status colonists elaborated new notions of collective honor, rooted in a shared heritage of frontier service, to pursue individual rights and privileges unavailable to them in Charcas’s urban core.

Northern Plains Borders and the People in Between is a transnational history of colonialism and mixed, mobile indigenous people in the borderlands of the northern Great Plains from 1860 to 1940. Based on archival documents from Canada and the United States, it focuses on social, spatial, political and legal developments. It demonstrates that when American and Canadian militaries invaded, they relied on and targeted mixed indigenous communities. Members of these communities were affiliated with tribes across the region, and moved often and far. As they mixed and moved, they were involved in the many different conflicts that wracked the Northern Plains after 1860, and they physically linked period violence in Canada and the United States. Subsequently, both countries incorporated Plains inhabitants through Indian treaties and state status categories that created mutually-exclusive, spatialized legal classifications—American or Canadian, Sioux or Cree, Métis, Indian, citizen, or alien. These classifications conveyed different rights, and status and rights were tightly tied to particular places, like homesteads, or nations or specific Indian reservations. One’s legal status thus had direct material implications, linking boundaries of race, place, tribe, and band to land. On both sides of the international line, these social and spatial borders criminalized mixture and mobility. With the concurrent spread of allotment and tribal enrollment, many borderlands indigenes were left stateless—they were excluded from every legal category through which Canada and the U.S. allocated status and rights. This study shows how statelessness flowed through prior racial, tribal and spatial classifications—like enrolled member of the U.S. Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indians. It wasn’t just the international boundary that created indigenous statelessness, but the multi-faceted and layered boundary-making of settler colonialism. For indigenous people, tribal membership boundaries, or enrollment, became the most significant aspect of allotment, both in terms of land loss and in terms of enduring community consequences. This dissertation concludes that statelessness originated not in overseas imperialism but in the earlier colonization of the continent. It also finds that the most critical implications of statelessness were material: stateless indigenes were not just landless, or homeless, but worse—their mere presence was forbidden everywhere. Legally, they had the right to occupy no place, no space. In this context, people contested their statelessness, pursuing legal status, rights and property into the 20th century. This study maps that ongoing political activity and associated mobility, revealing enduring indigenous geographies in a period when Indian people have been considered politically inactive, and reservation-bound. It shows how, into the 1940s, indigenous mixture and movement entwined Canadian and American histories, making them not just parallel but inseparable. Ultimately, it engages discussions of space, power, violence, law and the state as they relate to histories of borderlands, frontiers, and the West, Native Americans, First Nations, immigration and race.

This study examines the role of the Anglican Church in early colonial South Carolina, using for case studies the sites of St. Paul’s Parish Church (1707) and its associated parsonage, located near Charleston, South Carolina. The combination of archaeological excavations, historical documentary research, material culture analysis, and geophysical testing allows for three broad topics to be discussed - the architecture of St. Paul’s Parish Church, the use of the landscape by the Anglican Church, and studies of early-18th century life within a developing frontier. These topics contribute new information about colonial South Carolina on a number of scales. At the most local level, this study provides new information about the original St. Paul’s Parish Church, namely architectural details and the use of the landscape by its parishioners. Also, research at the parsonage site provides a rare opportunity to study an early-18th century homestead, addressing the daily activities of those people who lived there, as well as the social functions of the parsonage to the wider St. Paul’s parish community. On a more regional level, the role of St. Paul’s Church and Parish in the lives of parish residents is discussed, namely their role in maintaining English identity and the formation of a community within the frontier regions of the colony. A significant part of this research examines the ways the Anglican Church modified the landscape of South Carolina. The placement of Anglican churches in the rural areas appears to have been a material expression of the goals of the Church, namely to show its presence and power in the culturally and ethnically divided colony. The effects of the Anglican Church on the development of colonial South Carolina can then be studied alongside previous works in order to better understand the role that the Anglican Church and other major religious institutions played in colonization. The results indicate that the South Carolina Anglican Church played much larger, and often unseen, roles in the development of the colony during the early decades of the 18th century, beyond their religious and political roles.

Culture’s psychological impact stretches from some of the most basic perceptual processes to higher order reasoning. Yet much less is known about the impact of group differences within cultures due to factors such as social class, geographic region, or religion. Exploring within-culture differences not only provides insight into the psychological consequences of these factors, but can also inform our understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural differences operate and are maintained. In Chapter 2, I explore the effects of culture and social class on cognitive habits (attribution, patterns of visual attention, and reasoning about change) and symbolic representation of the self. Russians demonstrated more holistic cognitive patterns and less symbolic self-inflation than Americans; people from working-class backgrounds demonstrated more holistic cognitive patterns and less symbolic self-inflation than those from middle-class backgrounds. Furthermore, for both group comparisons, cognitive differences were partially mediated by differences in self-inflation, suggesting a common mechanism may underlie both group differences. In Chapter 3, I examined whether social class differences in causal inference might be due to relatively automatic or controlled processes. Previous research has found that cultural differences in causal inference appear to be due to differences in early-stage processing of personality-relevant information. Using an ERP paradigm, we found results for social class that were largely parallel to the previously observed cross-cultural difference, suggesting that differences in attribution related to culture and to social class both likely arise from automatic inference processes. In Chapter 4, I tested the voluntary settlement hypothesis by exploring regional variation in naming practices both within the US and Canada and comparing countries recently settled by Europeans with European countries. The voluntary settlement hypothesis (Kitayama, et al., 2010) holds that areas that were more recently frontiers both select for individuals who are more independent and promote independent values and behaviors. I found that popular names were less prevalent in US states and Canadian provinces that were more recently frontiers. The same pattern was observed comparing countries recently settled by Europeans with European countries, suggesting that the settling of frontiers has led to parallel differences both across and within countries.

Although the Mississippian culture area has been studied for decades, the frontier of the Mississippian region is less understood. Various Mississippian frontiers appear to have been important for the obtainment of trade goods which were important symbols of chiefly power. Studying these frontiers will allow archaeologists to better understand the emergence and maintenance of power within Southeastern chiefdoms. This dissertation explores one frontier site, Carter Robinson (44LE10) in southwestern Virginia, and its role in Southern Appalachian chiefdom power through its control of trade at the border. This research identifies ceramic and non-utilitarian markers of trade and identifies changes at the frontier site over time, an accumulation of power that occurred through control of trade.

The study of the eastern dynasties that ruled Khurāsān and Transoxania during the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries - most notably the Ṭāhirids (r. 205-259/821-873), Ṣaffārids (r. 247-393/861-1003), and Sāmānids (r. 204-395-819-1005) - has traditionally focused on the relationship between these dynasties and a weakened ‛Abbāsid Caliphate (r. 132-656/750-1258). This approach understands this period as a time when provincial governors sought to break away from a declining Caliphate in order to form their own independent dynasties. This project offers a different approach to the study of Khurāsān and Transoxania during the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, one which focuses on the role of these provinces as a frontier. Through the end of the fourth/tenth century, Khurāsān and Transoxania made up the eastern frontier of the Islamic world, facing the Turks of the Inner Asian steppe. This frontier created a unique set of circumstances in these provinces which affected the political, social, and economic networks of the region. This project applies a frontier studies approach to the eastern frontier during the reign of the eastern dynasties in order to present an alternative view of the history of these provincial dynasties. To achieve these goals, this project is divided into two major sections. The first (Chapters Two, Three, and Four) examines the “environment” of the frontier, exploring issues of how the eastern frontier was conceived by contemporary writers, the built environment of the frontier through a study of networks of fortifications, and the political and economic networks of the region, examined through minting practices. The second section (Chapters Five and Six) moves the focus onto the “frontier processes” of settlement, integration, and acculturation that shaped the eastern frontier from the time of the Arab conquests of the first/seventh and second/eighth centuries, through the reign of the eastern dynasties, and to the end of the fourth/tenth. This project seeks to place the eastern dynasties within local and imperial networks that developed along the eastern frontier in the early centuries of Muslim rule.

Do competitive pressures really force inefficient producers to shut down? Do entrants typically increase or worsen industry-wide efficiency? Is there evidence of systematic learning processes, and if yes, do these processes differ across plant cohorts? How do plant turnover effects combine to shape rates of overall industrial productivity growth? The thesis applies the recent econometric techniques to address these unexplored questions. Specifically, plant-specific time-variant technical efficiency indices are constructed for surviving, exiting, and entering plant cohorts, respectively. These are then used to compare productivity growth rates across plant-cohorts, and to examine the net effect of plant turnover and learning patterns on manufacturing-wide productivity growth. The analysis is based on plant-level panel data with all Chilean manufacturing plants with at least 10 workers, covering eight post-reform adjustment years 1979-86. The evidence supports the hypothesis that competitive pressures force less efficient producers to fail more frequently than others. Technical efficiency levels are higher among incumbents and entrants than among exiting plants. The productivity differences across cohorts are both systematic and persistent over time. The gap in productivity between incumbents and exiting plants, and between entrants and exiting plants has widened over time; while the gap between incumbents and entrants has shrunken over time. This is because exiting plants have declining productivity over time, while entrants plants gradually speed up their productivity growth. Moreover, competitive pressures have driven both incumbents and entrants to improve their productivity. The ratio of skilled labor to unskilled labor is higher and increasing more rapidly among incumbents and entrants than among exiting plants, providing an important source of learning and productivity growth. Although the 1982-83 recession affected the productivity of each cohort in different degrees, productivity steadily increased over the sample period, reflecting both the replacement of inefficient producers by efficient ones and the improvement of productivity by incumbents and entrants. These findings, insensitive to correcting for measurement errors and for selectivity bias, suggest that the basic patterns are robust and that the sweeping microeconomic reforms to liberalize the Chilean economy have been effective in promoting efficiency improvements in the manufacturing sector.