Inlands - (Global America) by Robert S G Fletcher & Alec Zuercher Reichardt

About the Book

"From the Americas to Zomia, interior spaces and inland regions have presented new challenges and opportunities for the writing of U.S. and global history. In working toward "a new historiography of large areas"-from the world's oceans and deserts to its forests, grasslands and mountains-historians, geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists have recovered the pasts of neglected inland spaces. Inlands interrogates these regions' contributions to wider polities, networks, and historical processes that far exceed their own accepted boundaries. With case studies centered on locations around today's United States, and in Africa, Eurasia, Australasia, and South America, Inlands focuses on the broader part these regions have played in the development, projection, and contestation of state power-particularly of empires-from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Together, Inlands argues for the significant role of inlands in the history of global connection and disconnection: an important revision to much work privileging the sea and the coasts, and a contribution to our understanding of the unevenness and the limits of contemporary globalization. Inlands interrogates those features of inland regions that have made them of wider national, imperial, and global historical importance. In the process, it builds upon two decades of scholarship in which historians have challenged assumptions about "cores" and "peripheries." Examining the changing relationships between the diverse peoples of inland regions has forced us to rethink how we measure the boundaries and extent of these regions, while historians map shifting perceptions of the 'inland' between actors and across time. Empires and other globalizing forces have often approached and defined interior spaces from the outside looking in, or across. Yet, for others, these same regions and zones were long-standing centers. In flipping the perspective-from the inland outward-Inlands explores how interior spaces have shaped the global"--

Book Synopsis

Conventional narratives of empires and globalization focus on oceans and coasts, supposing that global connections are seaborne and that historical change proceeds inward from port cities into continental expanses. This book offers a new perspective, examining key inland areas around the world to show how interior regions have shaped global history.

Inlands brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore the modern histories of inland regions across North and South America, Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia, from the American heartland to the Yangzi valley, the Great Dismal Swamp to the Arabian Desert. Together, they argue that interior regions provide a fresh vantage point from which to rethink the history of global connection and disconnection. Each chapter reconsiders national, regional, or imperial histories from an inland perspective, demonstrating how such places have spurred global change.

Contributors reveal the critical role inlands and their Indigenous inhabitants have played in the development, projection, and contestation of state power, showing how some interiors became essential to empire even as others developed in resistance to it. By examining the struggle to integrate inland regions into wider networks of exchange, this book also sheds light on the unevenness and the limits of contemporary globalization. A new global history of interior spaces, Inlands presents a bold challenge to dominant understandings of the making of today's connected world.

Review Quotes

Exploring twelve interior regions across the world, from the American Midwest to southeast China, Inlands shows that interior regions as much as coastal zones helped shape and reshape empires, trade, and geopolitics. The authors have given us a highly original perspective that turns global history inside out.--John Darwin, author of Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam, 1830-1930

Including essays from an impressive roster of scholars, Inlands is a welcome and needed addition to imperial studies. By focusing on inland areas, rather than the oceans and coasts that have dominated recent historiography, this important collection will help to further challenge long-standing interpretations of what drives the creation of empires--Andrew C. Isenberg, author of The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850

The contributors of Inlands offer readers variations on traditional global narratives that tend to sweep across oceans and coastlines. Through compelling arguments, this timely compilation reshapes beliefs of inlands as isolated and astutely reveals how the complex contours of the peoples, events, and places found in continental interiors are anchors for consequential connections made throughout global histories.--Elaine Marie Nelson, University of Kansas

About the Author

Robert S. G. Fletcher is professor of history and Kinder Professor of British History at the University of Missouri. His books include British Imperialism and "The Tribal Question" Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919-1936 (2015) and The Ghost of Namamugi: Charles Lenox Richardson and the Anglo-Satsuma War (2019).

Alec Zuercher Reichardt is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.