Types of Frontiers
Types of Frontiers
In the past, there were four distinguishable types of frontiers, these are:
1) Natural or Physical Frontiers:
Natural or physical frontiers are a region, which are large and wide, inaccessible/
inhospitable regions with absolutely no human concentration exits. For example, there
existed a vast natural or physical frontiers in Central Asia, between the advancing
Russia and the Great Chinese Wall in the antiquity. Another example is the
Himalayan and the trans-Himalayan regions together constituted a broad physical
frontier between China and the British Raj of India.
2) Ethnic or anthropogeographical frontier:
This frontier is lay between two or more political ecumenes. On one side less
upgraded racial people inhabited in comparison with the upgraded inhabitants in the
other sides. There are several examples of ethnic frontiers such as in a Balkan region
with its Slav population in South-East Europe, this ethnic frontier in the contemporary
world that lay between the Turkish ecumene & the Germanic ecumene. Another
example of ethnic frontiers like in a south-east Asia & in the west Asia.
3) Geometrical or Astronomical frontier:
In the nineteenth century, which regions ware drawn on almost empty areas of partly
unexplored continents and also drawn across the unknown interior territories, this regions
also called Geographical or Astronomical frontiers.
Example:
1. In the empty map of Africa the political realms of their colonial control, with the help
of meridians and parallels, ignoring the geographical reality of the partly explored
continent.
2. The west ward expansion of the American state from the Atlantic coast against the
retreating Indians because the interior was still unexplored.
4) Political Frontier :
Political frontier means the geographical boundary of a country including air and water territory.
Example :
1. A vast ‘political frontier' from the mountainous border of Iran in the west to the Hindukush
mountains in the east, between the British empire in South Asia, the Turkish empire across
South-East Europe and West Asia, and the Russian empire on the northern periphery of the
frontier.
2. The frontier between the Eastern United States and the Old West in the 1800s was an area
where European American settlements gradually thinned out and gave way to Native
American settlements or uninhabited land.