Description
This paper offers a new framework for examining security and authority across neighbouring imperial spaces by using ‘imperial infrastructure’ as an analytical lens. Recent scholarship on borderland studies, the New Imperial History, and critical international law have all dedicated increasing attention to tracing the colonial legacies shaping contemporary international borders across the globe. Yet their inter-imperial predecessors continue to be overlooked because there is not an adequate framework for examining borders and borderlands between competing European empires. Focusing on physical imperial infrastructures, however, allows us to look horizontally across cartographic boundary lines and makes visible the innovations intended to mitigate the highly permeable nature of the space between empires. In this respect, the infrastructures erected at the British Egypt-Italian Libya border were wholly unprecedented. Over the course of the interwar years, the British and Italians developed a wide range of imperial infrastructures – sophisticated governance and surveillance bureaucracies, telecommunications networks, energy technologies, transportation accesses, and the world’s first modern border fence and encampments for housing (forcibly) displaced people – across the frontier zone. Ultimately, this paper argues that these innovations signal a pivotal transition in frontier governance whereby law, infrastructure, and violence converged as key pillars of a burgeoning border security regime – elements of which exist to this day – designed to regulate human mobility, enhance imperial security, and stretch the authority of each empire to its territorial limits.
