involves someone working harder and differ-
ently, the question of who works, when and for
what return (a question played out in terms of
age, gender andclassin thepeasanthouse-
hold) is not posed by Boserup. Here, newer
work on household dynamics has more to offer
(Carney and Watts, 1990). mw
boundary At once a geographical marker
and a geographicalmakerof regulative author-
ity in social relations. As markers of authority,
boundaries range considerably inscale, signi-
ficance and social stability. From international
boundaries that mark thebordersbetween
nation-statesto the barbed-wire boundaries
that mark the perimeters of export-processing
zones, to the racially, religiously and/or sexu-
ally exclusive boundaries that still mark the
privileged places of decision-making occupied
by straight, white, Christian, men of property
in America, boundaries take many different
forms. But whether boundaries are the prod-
uct of international conventions, economic
expedience or cultural conservativism, a key
point highlighted in the work of geographers
is that boundaries are also geographically
constitutive makers as well as markers of regu-
lative power relations. In other words, inter-
national boundary lines actively operate to
create and consolidate the global norms of
nation-stateterritorialityand the national
identities forged under the resulting aegis of
state sovereignty (Paasi, 1996). Barbed-wire
fences aroundexport-processing zonesserve
directly to carve off such spaces from wider
political geographies of civil interaction,
labour organization and democratic oversight,
thereby depriving workers inside of numerous
citizenship rights (Klein, 2002). And the invis-
ible but often impenetrable boundaries
referred to by terms such as the ‘glass ceiling’
also clearly help enable and enforce spaces of
privileged authority (Berg, 2002).
Nevertheless, not all boundaries create their
regulative effects through binary ‘us–them’
partitions. In many cases of state boundary
drawinginsidemodern nation-states – includ-
ing the boundaries drawn to delineate elect-
oral districts, schools districts, police districts,
public health districts and so on – the act of
inscribing a boundary on amapand enforcing
it with routinized bureaucratic state actions on
the ground helps create the larger singular
effect we call ‘the state’. As Timothy Mitchell
(1991) has argued, following Foucault,state
effects can thereby be said to emerge through
the everyday acts of spatial organization
created by government. This is also no doubt
why the publishers of a book such asSeeing like
a state(Scott, J.C., 1998b) saw fit to put an
everyday image of a distinctly right-angled
turn in a road on the cover, an apparently
arbitrary turn, presumably produced by some
jurisdictional boundary marked on a state map.
But since a scholar such as Mitchell arguesvis-
a`-vistraditional state theories (including the
highly anthropomorphized and sovereigntist
kind advanced by Scott), the lesson of such
geographical boundary making is not that
there is a king-like state whose boundary-
drawing is a sign of top-down state dominance.
Rather, the point is that along with all the state
practices that the boundaries enable, the pro-
cess of boundary drawing is itself a disciplinary
dynamic that helps consolidate the authority of
the state. Mitchell applies this argument most
directly to theorizing the emergence of nation-
state power, but it can equally be argued to
apply to sub-national and transnational forms
of state-making too (Sparke, 2005). Once
examined in such venues as courtrooms and
free trade tribunals, boundary drawing can
also be seen as a highly contested mediation
process through which the power relations of
everyday social life, and the power relations of
government themselves begin to reappear as
if divided by a stark state/societyboundary.
However, as work by geographers on every-
thing from electoralgerrymandering(Forest,
2005) to community policing (Herbert, 2006)
shows, the concept of such a clear-cut state/
society boundary is better reinterpreted as a
site of fraught political–geographical struggles,
struggles which in the very process of blurring
the abstract state–society distinction often
end up creating new jurisdictional boundary
lines on the ground. msBrenner thesis A thesis proposed by histo-
rian Robert Brenner (1976) as a contribution
to a running debate within primarily Marxist
scholarship about the transition fromfeudal-
ismtocapitalism. Brenner emphasized the
ways in whichclass, and more specifically
propertyrelations, served as a ‘prime mover’
of economic change. His basic premise is that
the relationship between landlord and tenant
was exploitative and depended on ‘non-
economic compulsion’. Thus relations of pro-
duction in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
England were dominated by the institution
of serfdom, which was buttressed by the
manorial system and the commonlawthat
excluded serfs from access to royal courts
(which were reserved for those who were
legally free). Hence lords could act arbitrarilyGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_B Final Proof page 55 31.3.2009 11:01amBRENNER THESIS