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 École Normale Supérieure. 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 clichés about the 'second hundred years war' which is supposed to have pitted France and Britain in the eighteenth century.

• 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.

'Morieux offers a useful corrective to the new British history or 'archipelagic studies', whose challenge to Anglocentric history has a tendency to overlook Europe. It's a cliché to say a book is timely, but in the midst of another debate on borders this book presents a bigger picture.' Willy Maley, Times Higher Education