Herding:

To leave the story here is to miss the important intentionality—the agency—of these migrations. Where there is an open-land frontier and trade with lowland settlements, hill dwellers can enjoy a relatively prosperous life with less labor, not to mention avoiding taxes and corvée. Just as Lattimore noted that many of the pastoralists on the northern and western frontiers of China were cultivators of various backgrounds “who decided to break away from poverty-stricken farming to a more secure life as herdsmen,” so has the move to upland swiddening and foraging often been a voluntary move in terms of narrow economic self-interest. And when to that self-interest we add the advantage of keeping more of one’s crop and disposing of more of one’s own labor, the positive reasons for distancing oneself from state power might be convincing in material terms alone.

The second principle of evasion is mobility: the ability to change location. The inaccessibility of a society is amplified if, in addition to being located at the periphery of power, it can easily shift to a more remote and advantageous site. Just as there is a gradient of remoteness from state centers, so also might we imagine a gradient of mobility from a relatively frictionless ability to shift location to a relative immobility. The classic example of physical mobility is, of course, pastoral nomadism. Moving with their flocks and herds for much of the year, such nomads are constrained by the need for pasture but are unmatched in their ability to move quickly and over large distances. Their mobility is at the same time admirably suited to the raiding of states and of sedentary peoples. And indeed, pastoral nomads aggregated into “tribal” confederations have often posed the most serious military threat to sedentary grain-producing states. For our purposes, however, what is important are the evasive strategies vis-à-vis state power that nomadism makes possible.

Borders:

Since 1945, and in some cases before then, the power of the state to deploy distance-demolishing technologies—railroads, all-weather roads, telephone, telegraph, airpower, helicopters, and now information technology— so changed the strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples and nation-states, so diminished the friction of terrain, that my analysis largely ceases to be useful. On the contrary, the sovereign nation-state is now busy projecting its power to its outermost territorial borders and mopping up zones of weak or no sovereignty. The need for the natural resources of the “tribal zone” and the desire to ensure the security and productivity of the periphery has led, everywhere, to strategies of “engulfment,” in which presumptively loyal and land-hungry valley populations are transplanted to the hills.

The hegemony, in this past century, of the nation-state as the standard and nearly exclusive unit of sovereignty has proven profoundly inimical to nonstate peoples. State power, in this conception, is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle, be fully projected to the very edge of its territory, where it meets, again in principle, another sovereign power project- ing its command to its own adjacent frontier. Gone, in principle, are the large areas of no sovereignty or mutually canceling weak sovereignties. Gone too, of course, are peoples under no particular sovereignty. As a practical matter, most nation-states have tried, insofar as they had the means, to give substance to this vision, establishing armed border posts, moving loyal populations to the frontier and relocating or driving away “disloyal” populations, clearing frontier lands for sedentary agriculture, building roads to the borders, and registering hitherto fugitive peoples.