Crossing the Hyphen of History: the Scottish Borders of Anglo-Irishness

Abstract

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines the ‘Border’, with a capital letter, as the ‘boundary and adjoining districts between England and Scotland, N. Ireland and the Irish Republic, US and Mexico, etc.’. This is an interesting choice of examples. A‘borderer’, on the other hand is a ‘dweller on or near [a] frontier, especially that between England and Scotland’.¹The word ‘border’ comes from ‘board’, which stems in turn from two distinctive Germanic words, ‘bordham’ and ‘bordhaz’, meaning ‘board’ and ‘border’ respectively. To border is also to board, to neighbour, but also to colonize. If we take on board this double derivation, we can see that it fits in with what we know of borders today, and of borders in the early modern period — my period. Periodization is something that postcolonialism cannot ignore, particularly given the academic history that has encouraged it to look for the signs of empire no further back than the nineteenth or at best the eighteenth centuries, and to confine its attention to places beyond Britain, rather than those abutting England.² Historical borders, no less than geographical ones, demand to be crossed.