James Crawford

No matter where you turn, it seems that the taut lines of borders are vibrating to—or even calling—the tune of global events. Today, there are more borders in the world than ever before in human history. Beginning with the earliest known example, Crawford travels to many borders old and new: from a melting glacial landscape to the conflict-torn West Bank...

Shortlisted for The Great Outdoors Reader Awards Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny...

A deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction. Humanity has remade the Earth with astonishing speed. In the last fifty years alone we have taken more out of the planet than in all prior history combined. Across every continent lie the immense wounds left behind by extraction—the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers, and hollowed-out towns that now form...

You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no plaques to explain their...

In this book, James Crawford argues that our enduring obsession with borders has brought us to a crisis point: that we are entering the endgame of a process that began thousands of years ago, when we first started dividing up the earth. Today, nationalism, climate change, globalisation, technology, and mass migration are all colliding with ever-hardening borders. Something has to...