China’s westernmost province, Xinjiang, has experienced persistent violence, cycles of interethnic strife, and state repression throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most research on the area tends to zero in on the ethnic clashes and political disputes behind the escalating tensions. In Natural Resources and the New Frontier, historian Judd Kinzley takes a different approach—one that works from the ground up to explore the infrastructural and material basis for state power in the region and how it helped create and shape these tensions.

As Kinzley argues, Xinjiang’s role in supplying resources to heavily industrialized neighbors has served as an important factor in fueling unrest. He carefully traces the buildup to this unstable situation over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on shifts in mining and industrial production policies that were undertaken by Chinese, Soviet, and provincial officials. Through his detailed archival work, Kinzley offers a new way of viewing Xinjiang that will shape the conversation about this important region. Moreover, his detailed analysis offers a new way of viewing borders as sites of “layered” state formation that will serve as a model for understanding China’s peripheries across Asia and, more generally, frontier zones throughout the Global South.

Judd Kinzley is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.