What the “midwest” and manifest destiny teach us about imperialism

Another offcut from the book.

It is, finally, out. As of Thursday, my new book, A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps, is available everywhere that sells such things, in hardback, e-book or audiobook read, awkwardly, by yours truly. It’s a collection of essays covering borders from the unification of Egypt in 3100BCE to the Branson-Bezos space race of 2021, via the Great Wall of China, the free trade policies of Genghis Khan, the invention of the Prime Meridian, the failure to invent the International Date Line, plus assorted dates (843, 1494, 1885, 1916) on which European powers divide up the world between them with HILARIOUS results.

The display at Stanford’s at the book launch of the year last Wednesday night.

I may well, at some point, publish an actual extract from it on this newsletter. For now though, here’s the third and final chapter that ended up on the cutting room floor. (The others concerned Cromartyshire, Scotland’s stupidest county, and the confusing habit of some cities to claim unexpected bits of river, estuary or sea.) If you were a paying subscriber last August, then you’ll have already seen it, and I apologise for the repeat. Otherwise, though, let’s go.

“I see now that this has been a story of the West after all,” Nick Carraway, narrator of The Great Gatsby, says in the novel’s last chapter. “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

The funny thing about this quote is that, by any reasonable standard, those characters aren’t from the “west” of the United States at all. The characters come variously from Minnesota and Kentucky and Illinois, all states that are comfortably within the eastern half of that great continent-crossing land mass. Gatsby himself claims to be from San Francisco, but since that claim comes in answer to the question “What part of the middle west” he is from, and since it’s not true anyway – he’s from North Dakota, pretty much bang in the middle – he is clearly either deliberately lying or joking or both. The “west” Carraway refers to is the “midwest”, a region which begins only a couple of hundred miles from the east coast and ends still nearly a thousand from the west. East versus west, anyone who has ever sat through a high school literature class will remember, is a key theme of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel – yet the west being referred to is really hardly west at all.

In some ways, the midwest doesn’t really exist – it is not, for example, a unit of government – and as a result its boundaries are sometimes a little fluid. The region defined by the US Census Bureau, the closest it has to an official existence, includes 12 states, stretching from Ohio in the East, to the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas – the first states beyond the Mississippi – in the west. Other bodies, though, use other definitions, perhaps throwing in Kentucky or Arkansas or omitting Missouri. 

The US census bureau’s definition of the Midwest. Image: Wikipedia/CC BY 2.0.

The Midwest nonetheless retains a very strong cultural existence. In the collective American unconscious, those on the eastern seaboard may be stuck up, those in the west weird, those in the south backwards and perhaps a little scary. The midwest, though, is where the real America is to be found. It’s not called the heartland merely because it’s the bit of the country that’s furthest from the ocean, although that helps: it’s also because it’s where people are nice and wholesome, a little conservative perhaps but fundamentally decent. It’s the land of Happy Days and Frank Capra films, the sort of place where over-educated characters in Aaron Sorkin shows go to learn a little something about themselves.

In recent years, the idea of the midwest has picked up another, related implication: it’s also home to most of the “rust belt”, the industrial region that has spent the last half century in sharp decline, and whose citizens have consequently switched from reliably blue (in both their collar, and their tendency to vote Democrat) to unnervingly red (going Republican to support Donald Trump and, in many cases, not coming back). This is almost certainly a local and entirely explicable matter of economics and demographics – short version: economic decline means a bunch of young people leave for the coasts, where there are jobs, and never come back – but it nonetheless, combined with the nonsense discussed in the previous paragraph, generated thousands upon thousands of think pieces about how the “real America” was giving up on the Democrats. It has also sometimes led to Pennsylvania, which is not a midwestern state by any definition – it gets to within 40 miles of the Atlantic Ocean; it’s literally where the constitution was written – being bundled up with it as if they’re the same thing.

To understand how a part of the United States that is not in any sensible sense “west” ended up tagged as such, it helps to remember that the United States was not always the size or shape it is today. All but one of the thirteen colonies which declared independence from Britain in 1776 had an Atlantic coastline. The new nation’s territorial claims may in places have reached deep inland; but the part containing actual Americans in any number was over a thousand miles long but only a few dozen miles wide, a sort of 18th century Chile. Beyond that lay a vast block of French territory, and beyond that the Spanish Empire. Neither power could be said to fully control the land that it claimed – Europeans were thin on the ground, and native tribes rather stubbornly insisted on existing – but what matters for our purposes was that this land was not, in the newfangled national sense, “American”.

Since the vast majority of the US population lived all but in sight of the coast, it made sense to describe anywhere beyond the Appalachians, the mountain chain playing the part of the Andes, as “the west”: as late as the 1820s, Bill Bryson notes in Made In America, Kentucky’s leading newspaper could call itself the Argus of Western America. It was based in Frankfort, a city roughly a fifth of the way across the continent. 

As the 19th century wore on, though, the shape of the US changed, so the notion of the west changed with it. In 1803, the government of Thomas Jefferson paid $15m – just $18 per square mile – for the stretch of land the First French Republic actually controlled, plus the right to throw native tribes off the rest of the vast territory known as Louisiana. Napoleon got some funding for his European wars; the US got enough land for a dozen new states. The existing inhabitants got displaced. 

More western expansion followed: Texas, and the vast swathe of land conquered in the Mexican American War of 1846-8; the Oregon Territory, incorporated after an agreement with the British, rather than the locals, on how to divide up the Pacific Northwest. Throughout this time, settlers moved west in search of gold to make their fortunes, or virgin lands for farming. Some, though, were motivated simply by the sentiment expressed by the popular columnist John O’Sullivan, who spoke of the “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”. At risk of sounding like a broken record here: what providence had in mind for the people whose ancestors had lived on that land for centuries did not seem to come into it. 

In British English, the word “frontier” had a meaning similar to “border”: this entire book, really, is about frontiers. In the new country, though, it came to mean something different: the line between civilisation and wilderness, between the settled and the unexplored. For the first century or more of the United States’ existence, the frontier moved gradually westwards, from the Appallachians to the Mississippi to the Rockies and beyond. And so, the concept of the “west”, as the land hard by the frontier, moved westwards with it.¹ 

All of which means that, as Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby in the early 1920s, there would have been people alive, just, who could remember when states like North Dakota really were the west: it was not an affectation, even if it was now wildly inaccurate. And because labels our elders have used since childhood can be hard to shift, the original west didn’t lose its name: it simply became the midwest, to distinguish it from the true west. The existence of the midwest, in other words, is testament to manifest destiny, and the US’s long century of westward expansion.

There is, though, another way of seeing it.

Regions and provinces of China. Image: China National Bureau of Statistics.

In 2020, the city of Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, became unfortunately world-famous for its wet markets, after they were identified as the source of the world’s first outbreak of Covid-19. What went unnoticed, because we all had rather a lot of other things on our mind, was how odd it was that Hubei was frequently described as part of “central China”: it is very clearly in the eastern third of the country, far, far closer to the Pacific than to the steppes of central Asia. And yet, this is a label that is apparently used by the Chinese government itself: maps produced by the country’s National Bureau of Statistics label the space occupied by just over a third of the country’s provinces, but closer to two-thirds of its landmass, as “western China”. 

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Nearly 6,000km away at the other end of that steppe, you’ll find another confusingly named region. Russia is divided into eight “federal districts”, collections of “federal subjects” (oblasts and so on), which the government of Vladimir Putin has collected together to bypass local power centres and tighten his control over his country. 

The Central Federal District of Russia. Image: Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 2.5.

One of these, the region surrounding Moscow is known as the Central Federal District, despite being almost right up against the country’s western boundaries. This, in other words, is the area from which Russia expanded, first as an empire, then as the USSR: the Russian Federation which exists today and inherited its boundaries from those earlier imperial projects also inherited their views on geography. 

The parallels here are clear and, dare I say, not particularly flattering to the United States. All three of these countries can be seen as huge, surviving land empires, which expanded from historic heartlands deep into their respective landmasses. That required conquest, sometimes violent, which in turn meant displacing or destroying existing communities. And while the US may not have its equivalents of the Uiyghurs or Tibetans, fighting for their lives in western China, today, it did nonetheless agree over 400 treaties with the indigenous population of the lands that it conquered, and broke, on some estimates, every single one.

Of the 12 states in the Midwest, four are named for the tribes who previously inhabited the land, and seven more have names drawn from indigenous languages. The etymology of the 12th, Indiana, does not need spelling out. It isn’t merely in the term “midwest” that you can find the United States’ origins as an imperial project on the map today.²

If you’d like more of that sort of thing, and would like to see what didn’t end up on the cutting room floor, you can buy the book now from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords and Foyles, among others. Here are the contents pages:

List of Maps xi

Introduction 1

PART ONE: HISTORIES

The Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt 11

The Great Wall of China and the Border as Unifier 15

Why is Europe Not a Peninsula in Asia? 22

The Roman Limes and the Power of the Periphery 28

The Legacies of Charlemagne 36

The Borders of Great Britain 44

Of Feudalism, Marquises, Margraves and Marcher Lords 52

The Open Borders Policies of Genghis Khan 58

Spain and Portugal Carve up the World 66

Holy, Roman and an Empire 72

Britain, Ireland and the Invention of Cartographic 

Colonialism 80

The Much Misunderstood Mason–Dixon Line 87

The Local Government Reforms of Emperor Napoleon I 96

The American Invasion of Mexico 103

The Schleswig-Holstein Business 108

‘. . . Where No White Man Ever Trod’ 114

The Sudan–Uganda Border Commission 122

European Nationalism and the United States of 

Greater Austria 127

Britain and France Carve up the Middle East 135

The Partition of Ulster 142

The Partition of India 147

The Iron Curtain and the Division of Berlin 156

PART TWO: LEGACIES

Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Eastern Germany/Western Russia 165

The Strange Case of Bir Tawil 172

The Dangers of Gardening in the Korean DMZ 177

China’s Nine-dash Line and Its Discontents 185

The Uncertain Borders Between Israel and Palestine 192

The Siamese Twin Towns of Baarle-Hertog and 

Baarle-Nassau 200

The US–Canada Border, and the Trouble with Straight Lines 205

Some Places Which Aren’t Switzerland 211

Some Notes on Microstates 217

City Limits 223

The Curse of Suburbia and the Borders of Detroit 230

Washington, DC and the Square Between the States 236

Borders from a Land Down Under 243

Some Accidental Invasions 251

Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the ‘Google Maps War’ 256

The Mapmaker’s Dilemma 261

PART THREE: EXTERNALITIES

A Brief History of the Prime Meridian 267

Some Notes on Time Zones 275

A Brief History of the International Date Line 282

Of Maritime Boundaries and the Law of the Sea 288

Some Notes on Landlocked Countries 295

How the World Froze Territorial Claims in Antarctica 299

The Other, Bigger, More Musical Europe 307

Boundaries in the Air 313

The Final Frontier 318

Conclusion: The End of the Line 325

Sources and Further Reading 329

Acknowledgements 345

Index 347

And here’s another picture of the book launch. Note the famous science writer looking awkward in the foreground:

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1. At times indeed, there was land beyond: Bryson also quotes newspaper reports from the 1850s & 60s, in which settlers in the Oregon territories talk about going “back to America”.

2. My exact numbers here are debatable – other interpretations are possible and valid – but I’d argue that Illinois (“speaks normally”; drawn, indirectly, from the Algonquian label for the Illiniwek tribe), Kansas (named for a river, named for the Kaw tribe) and the Dakotas (a word meaning “ally or friend”, and referring to the Dakota tribe) can be said to be named specifically after peoples.