Border of Water and Ice explores the significance of the Yalu River as a strategic border between Korea and Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of Japanese imperial expansion into the region. The Yalu's seasonal patterns of freezing, thawing, and flooding shaped colonial efforts to control who and what could cross the border. Joseph A. Seeley shows how the unpredictable movements of water, ice, timber-cutters, anti-Japanese guerrillas, smugglers, and other borderland actors also spilled outside the bounds set by Japanese colonizers, even as imperial border-making reinforced Japan's wider political and economic power.

Drawing on archival sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Seeley tells the story of the river and the imperial border haphazardly imposed on its surface from 1905 to 1945 to show how rivers and other nonhuman actors play an active role in border creation and maintenance. Emphasizing the tenuous, environmentally contingent nature of imperial border governance, Border of Water and Ice argues for the importance of understanding history across the different seasons.

Joseph A. Seeley is Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia. He specializes in the histories of Korea, the Japanese Empire, and East Asian environments and borderlands.

Joseph A. Seeley's Border of Water and Ice makes a distinctive and timely contribution to connecting the growing environmental history literature on Manchuria, the Japanese empire, and Asian rivers.

Joseph Seeley has produced an excellent book for historians interested in Sino-Korean border spaces, Japan's 20th century continental empire and its infrastructure, and the entwined environmental legacies of both colonial Korea and Manchukuo.

Seeley's work examines a specific period in the Yalu River's history, when the Empire of Japan decided to bend the river to its will and reshape its flow.. . Border of Water and Ice is an innovative and imaginative work.