By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure—from ports of arrival to train cars and depots to settlements—showing how the built environment of the railways fostered segregation through physical isolation and reinforced hierarchies according to race, ethnicity, and class. Catherine Boland Erkkila highlights the magnitude of this forced separation: how spatial design and the experiences within it reflected prejudices of contemporary middle-class Americans who viewed immigrants as poor, diseased, and dangerous. Spaces of Immigration draws attention to the control wielded by railroad companies and government officials, who dispatched European immigrants to ethnic enclaves across the Midwest, some of which still exist. These colonization efforts, Boland Erkkila argues, were motivated by profit through exploitation: the promise of cheap labor and the purchase of land along designated routes. At the same time, Asian immigrants were detained like prisoners on the West Coast. This book ultimately offers a greater understanding of the immigrant experience in America through the lens of spatial history, revealing deeply embedded conflicts still pervasive in our society today.
At various points over the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve debated writing different books on territory. Many of the articles I’ve written on this topic were early versions of parts of the books I did write on territory, but not all. I began to work seriously on territory around 2000, initially thinking I would write a history of the concept of territory in Western political thought. That book was eventually published as The Birth of Territory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), but I put it aside for a couple of years to write a much more contemporary study, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). After I completed The Birth of Territory, I began to write a book on Shakespeare, but the beginning of the Foucault project delayed the completion of that study, which was published as Shakespearean Territories(University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Terror and Territory and The Birth of Territory were career-changing books for me, helping with promotions at Durham and a move to Warwick. Both won prizes and were quite widely reviewed, generally positively though of course with some exceptions. I still think The Birth of Territory is the best book I’ve written. Shakespearean Territories is the least read of these three books, but it’s one I was pleased to have completed. It was intended both to be an examination of territory and more broadly geographical questions in Shakespeare, but also to use Shakespeare to develop my theorisation of territory, and to push me to address some of the things I’d neglected in previous work, as some reviewers pointed out. In particular, that book looks at corporeal, colonial and material aspects of territory, as well as the political, geographical, economic, legal, technical aspects I’d stressed before.
The cover pages of three of the articles mentioned – “Secure the Volume”, “How Should We Do the History of Territory?” and “Legal Terrain”
In my earliest writings on territory, I was developing a conceptualisation of territory in relation to contemporary issues – such as debates about globalisation, the European Union’s constitution (with Luiza Bialasiewicz and Joe Painter), and the ‘war on terror’, which all fed into Terror and Territory. A lot of this work was done while I was working with the International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University, with Martin Pratt, John Donaldson and Alison Williams, among others. Some of the work I edited with Jeremy Crampton around calculation was important in my thinking too. My 2010 article “Land, Terrain, Territory” was an early version of the introduction to The Birth of Territory, but elaborates on some points more than the book version. In particular, I challenged the relation between territory and territoriality in that piece, as I did in some detail in a piece that discussed Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri: “The State of Territory Under Globalization”.
Shortly after I’d completed The Birth of Territory, I gave a lecture in Kentucky and later in Edinburgh which has received a lot of attention compared to my other articles. “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power” was the beginning of my attempt to take the dimensionality and materiality of territory much more seriously. In that piece I was building on work by Eyal Weizman and Stephen Graham, and urban exploration work such as that by Bradley Garrett, and trying to link this together through the architectural work of Paul Virilio and others. This developed into my work on terrain, particularly in two articles “Legal Terrain: The Political Materiality of Territory” and “Terrain, Politics, History”. There have been some other related pieces, but those three articles have most of the key claims I’ve made. Some of this work was in dialogue with Phil Steinberg and others connected to the ICE-LAW project he directed, and with Gastón Gordillo and the contributors to conference sessions we organised. I debated for a long time about writing a book about “the political materiality of territory”, and applied for a fellowship for that project. I was shortlisted but ultimately unsuccessful, and a couple of planned talks on the idea were cancelled in the early days of the pandemic. The Foucault work developed a lot more, I began thinking about other things, and I never returned to that project. Although these circumstances were part of the reason, I felt I was running out of new things to say, in part because work in that register was being done well by so many other people.
Alongside these pieces, there had been occasional articles or chapters which thought about territory in relation to some of the theorists I had an interest in but generally in other registers. At one point I considered doing something more systematic on territory’s theorists, but what I did write covered only some of the key names. “Governmentality, Calculation, Territory” and, a while later, “How Should We Do the History of Territory?” addressed these questions in relation to Michel Foucault, as did a book chapter on “Foucault and Geometrics”, which particularly relates to the terrain interest. Neil Brenner and I wrote a piece on “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory” which developed from our editorial work for the State, Space, World collection of Lefebvre’s writings. If I was to do more on Lefebvre, it might be to develop some ideas around land, which relate to the On the Ruralcollection I co-edited with Adam David Morton. I wrote a piece on Carl Schmitt too, in part because I was fed up with the continual references to Nomos of the Earth after its English translation. In my reading Schmitt is not very insightful and politically dangerous. I also wrote shorter pieces on Jean Gottmann and Grégoire Chamayou. Some of the editorial introductions I wrote for collections to essays on Peter Sloterdijk, one of which was with Eduardo Mendieta, talked about his spatial work, but were less directly on territory.
Some of these pieces were written in response to particular invitations, either to speak or contribute to something, but there was also a piece on Boko Haram which was written about some of what I learned in visits to Nigeria. A piece on “Territory/Territoriality” situated these issues in relation to debates in urban theory. There are a couple of review essays, some book reviews, prefaces or other shorter contributions which are not listed here, and themes cross between different pieces.
Not all of this work would be worth revisiting, but there are some arguments in these which are not in the books on territory I wrote. A loose grouping of some of these articles and chapters might look something like this.
(I’ve linked to the publisher sites below, since some pieces are open access. Many of these pieces are available elsewhere on this site or Researchgate. But if something isn’t accessible to you, email me.)
Political and Conceptual
“The Constitution of EU Territory”, with Luiza Bialasiewicz and Joe Painter, Comparative European Politics 3 (3), 2005, pp. 333-63.
“Terrain, Politics, History”, Dialogues in Human Geography 11 (2), 2021, 170-89, with responses by Gastón Gordillo, Kimberley Peters, Bruno Latour, Deborah P. Dixon and Rachael Squire, and my reply, “The Limits of Territory and Terrain”, 213-17.
This is the 63rd post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and now entering a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
While migrants face many dangers in attempting to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea—from drowning to dying of dehydration—they also confront an elaborate legal system that is designed to return them to their countries of origin. In The Borders of Responsibility, Kiri Olivia Santer outlines the architecture of these legal systems and how they help Europe evade legal responsibility for rescuing migrants. Focusing on legal agreements between Italy and Libya that have resulted in the systematic interception of migrants, Santer shows how Europe’s liberal identity is belied by legal agreements that let migrants die at sea or that send them back to dangerous, exploitative situations in post-Gaddafi Libya or their home countries. Law, she argues, is the tool that enables states to affect control beyond territory, whilst disappearing their responsibility for violence across border assemblages. Through ethnographic fieldwork with migrants, lawyers, policy makers, and humanitarian workers, Santer shows how the law is too often used as an instrument of violence against migrants, who fall outside of conventional structures of legal rights.
In The Book of Others, Benjamin Arditi examines the enduring theoretical influence of four major political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau, and Jacques Rancière—whom he frames as “others” central to shaping contemporary understandings of politics. Arditi situates these figures within the terrain of post-foundational thought, emphasizing their skepticism about transcendental grounds in political theory. Through chapters focused on themes like modernity, constituent power, decisionism, ideology, hegemony, post-hegemony, populism, and dissensus, the book explores how each thinker redefines the political as a space of contestation rather than a settled domain.
This is no exegetical exercise. Arditi challenges canonical interpretations by exposing the internal tensions and ambivalences in each thinker’s work. He treats their published texts as provisional interventions rather than their last word on a particular subject, approaching them as intellectual sparring partners in a form of conceptual shadow boxing. Through this dynamic and polemical approach, Arditi pushes their ideas into directions they either did not anticipate or deliberately avoided. The result is a nuanced understanding of post-foundational political thought and makes a compelling case for thinking both with and against influential theorists.
The Book of Others significantly enriches critical political analysis, offering a substantive contribution to post-Marxist, democratic, and critical theory.
While interconnections between humanitarian actors and military operations are a pervasive feature of contemporary conflicts around the globe today, Military Humanitarianism challenges the idea that these interactions are a recent phenomenon. Instead, this volume offers an alternative interpretation to the traditional framing of military actors as a homogenous group and humanitarian actors as impartial intermediaries between armed groups and aid recipients.
In tracing a longer lineage beyond the post–Cold War period and twenty-first century, Military Humanitarianism uncovers a deeper history of entanglement between “humanitarian” and “military” actors—supposedly distinct categories that have long been mutually constitutive. By examining the malleability of these concepts and bringing different contexts into conversation, both editors and contributors reveal the tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes of defining “humanitarian” action in practice, particularly in contrast to military operations. As a result, Military Humanitarianism provides timely insight into the understanding and politics of humanitarian operations, on and beyond the battlefield. It asks not just what it means to “help” but who gets to—and why.
Contributors: Cedric Cotter, Maria Cullen, Lewis Defrates, Bronwen Everill, Matilda Greig, Baher Ibrahim, Julia F. Irwin, Norman Joshua, Jonathan McCollum, Justine Meberg, Michelle Moyd, Daniel Palmieri, Elisabeth Piller, Lou Pingeot, Pietro Stefanini, and Jiayi Tao.
Few ideas have had a more powerful effect on the modern world than that of race, yet few ideas are less understood. Bringing together contributions from leading international scholars, this volume traces the crystallisation of this concept in western intellectual discourse in the eighteenth century, its rapid rise to prominence as a governing concept across the world from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, and its legacy from the Cold War and era of decolonisation to the present. Through multiple case studies, the chapters provide new angles on more familiar contexts, such as Enlightenment Europe, while introducing related themes in areas including India and New Zealand. Race in the Modern World offers a comparative understanding of the multiplicity of ways that race has been conceptualised, how these ideas changed over time, and how the world of ideas shapes the world in which we live.
Chekhov’s fiction offers a subtle yet powerful message: another life is possible. Something can always happen to our lives – a possibility that breaks the monotony of servitude and points to a different, more liberated existence. This is the way to approach all these brief tales of lost lives, nights filled with tears and joy, landscapes, or love, against the cynicism of those who believe that time is destined to replicate the same. In these glimmers, new forms of life arise – noble and sensible shapes that we occasionally perceive and may strive to unfold if we have the courage to do so.
Jacques Rancière, using Chekhov’s stories as a lens, sees literature not as a source of knowledge but as a catalyst for reshaping the fabric of being. He illuminates the profound capability of literature: positioning us within the landscape of freedom, transparent about the distance it holds from the reality of servitude, yet unwavering in the standards it sets, inviting us to strive towards them.
Conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation across the Atlantic from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship
Freedom Ship is a gripping history of the enslaved African Americans who stowed away on vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the American South. Many moved northwards through a network of secret routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. Thousands of others, most of them completely unknown, escaped by sea. Their dramatic accounts of whispered conspiracy and billowing sails make Freedom Ship essential and enthralling reading.
From the docks of Savannah and Charleston to Boston Harbor and beyond, Freedom Ship traces the seekers who turned their sights to the sea. Stowaways regularly arrived in Britain aboard cotton ships bound for Liverpool. Moses Roper, one of the most determined runaways in American history, travelled 350 miles through slave country before boarding the Napoleon and sailing for England. He became the first self-emancipated bondsman to lecture in the cause of abolition in Britain. Legendary abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman both saw the shipping lanes as paths to freedom.
Marcus Rediker displays a prodigious command of archival research to embark on a thrilling journey along the Atlantic seaboard, following those who risked everything in a maritime pursuit of freedom.
