The Channel
England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century

This book approaches the English Channel as a border which connected, as much as it separated, France and England in the eighteenth century.

Renaud Morieux (Author)

9781108441841, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 November 2017

417 pages, 16 b/w illus. 13 tables
23 x 15.3 x 2.1 cm, 0.6 kg

'… a powerful antidote and alternative perspective to those who see Anglo-French relations only through the prism of conflict. It is a profoundly optimistic view and in that, as much as in the subject it deals with, it is a timely and welcome intervention.' John McAleer, The English Historical Review

Rather than a natural frontier between natural enemies, this book approaches the English Channel as a shared space, which mediated the multiple relations between France and England in the long eighteenth century, in both a metaphorical and a material sense. Instead of arguing that Britain's insularity kept it spatially and intellectually segregated from the Continent, Renaud Morieux focuses on the Channel as a zone of contact. The 'narrow sea' was a shifting frontier between states and a space of exchange between populations. This richly textured history shows how the maritime border was imagined by cartographers and legal theorists, delimited by state administrators and transgressed by migrants. It approaches French and English fishermen, smugglers and merchants as transnational actors, whose everyday practices were entangled. The variation of scales of analysis enriches theoretical and empirical understandings of Anglo-French relations, and reassesses the question of Britain's deep historical connections with Europe.

Introduction
Part I. The Border Invented: 1. The impossibility of an island: before the Channel was a sea
2. When the sea had no name
Part II. The Border Imposed: 3. Defending the military frontier
4. Who owns the Channel? The overlap of legal rights
5. The fight for natural resources
Part III. Transgressing the Border: 6. The fisherman: 'friend of all nations'?
7. The game of identities: fraud and smuggling
8. Crossing the Channel
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Maritime history [HBTM], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1], European history [HBJD]