Indeed, there are so many issues raised in this essay that space does not allow a full explanation. A brief discussion of four elements will have to suffice. 1 Adelman and Aron have devised what they claim to be a new way to understand the history of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century diplomacy and race relations in North America. By definition, treaties are fictive or cynical tracts.
Frontiers are ambiguous, borderless meeting places that involve cultural mixing.
Borderlands are places of European imperial rivalry where Indians slyly seek micro-diplomatic openings. Once the rivalry is over, borderlands can become bordered land, where national borders are defined, and indigenous peoples are swallowed up by national cultures. This is process history. It is Turnerian, and that is all fine and dandy, yet the authors seem uncomfortable with the baggage that the Turner thesis brings with it. There is a very selective historiographical murmuring.