| Summary: | This chapter explains that the geographical area that Converging Empires refers to as the “north Pacific borderlands” is defined by the northernmost stretches of the US-Canada border that divide British Columbia and the Yukon from Alaska, as well as US and Canadian national land and ocean boundaries along the Alaska and B.C. coasts, situating this borderlands region within the broader context of the North Pacific Rim and particularly Japan. A complex Indigenous borderlands region long before the arrival of European imperial powers, this was the area where British, US, and Japanese interests converged in the early decades of the 20 th century. Largely regarded as peripheral by the imperial powers and nation states that incorporated parts of the region within their borders, it has not been given the same attention by border and borderlands historians as the US-Mexico border or the 49 th parallel. Converging Empires addresses this gap in the literature, noting the key role that the north Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship in both Canada and the United States and tracing both Indigenous and Japanese migrant negotiations of the borders that came to cut across it on a variety of scales.
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