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.

Author Biography

Renaud Morieux is a Lecturer in British History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Social History Society. Previously he was a Lecturer in Modern History for five years at the University of Lille, France and studied at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure. Renaud Morieux specialises in both French and British historiography and his experience of living in both countries has given him an original perspective on their intertwined histories. His research could be labelled as transnational history from below; it is an archive-based history, theoretically informed, which revises the cliches about the 'second hundred years war' which is supposed to have pitted France and Britain in the eighteenth century.