Sublime

In the end, this book’s main contribution is not archival, bringing to light some never-before-seen document. It’s perspectival, seeing a familiar history differently. The history of the Greater United States, as I’ve come to view it, can be told in three acts. The first is westward expansion: the pushing west of national borders and the

There had been border disputes, frontier actions, Polish war games within yards of Hindenberg’s border fence. Hindenberg unofficially offered its services as a haven for some of Poland’s wealthier and more powerful mafia bosses, and refused to sign an extradition treaty with its Slavic neighbour. The latest tit-for-tat involved Hindenberg’s railway

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and

Paul’s ambition was one bred of the age. Never before had a single power controlled all the shipping lanes of the Mediterranean; never before had there been such a network of roads along its shores.

The Union has no neighbors—No metropolis—The Americans have had the chances of birth in their favor—America an empty country—How this circumstance contributes powerfully to the maintenance of the democratic republic in America—How

Geographic frontiers are what we tend to think of when frontiers are invoked: the vast unspoiled vistas, the abundant and yet uncounted resources. All of the New World—North and South America, the Caribbean, and every island near the coasts—was a vast geographic frontier for the Beringians.

There is, I believe, a long period, measured not in centuries but in millennia—between the earliest appearance of states and lasting until perhaps only four centuries ago—that might be called a “golden age for barbarians” and for nonstate peoples in general. For much of this long epoch, the political enclosure movement represented by the modern