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.

The Fountain of Privilege applies contemporary economic and political theory to answer long-standing historical questions about modernization. In particular, it contrasts political stability in Georgian England with the collapse of the Old Regime in France. Why did a century of economic expansion rupture France’s political foundations while leaving those of Britain intact? Comparing the political and financial institutions of the two states, Hilton Root argues that the French monarchy’s tight control of markets created unresolvable social conflicts whereas England’s broader power base permitted the wider distribution of economic favors, resulting in more flexible and efficient markets. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

This book places early modern Scottish maritime warfare in its European context. Its formidably broad range of sources sheds light on many previously little known, or unknown, aspects of naval history. It also provides many valuable new perspectives on the importance of the sea to the Scots, and of the Scots to the naval history of Great Britain.