The Channel, Renaud Morieux's historical study of the waterway alternately known as the English Channel, La Manche, and a number of other terms, is first and foremost an exploration of the waterway as a zone of contact between France and England. It is, however, a book with multiple aspirations. Over the course of three parts, Morieux explains how “the Channel” came to be defined as a specific geographic entity, how England and France struggled to assert state sovereignty over the waters that divided them, effectively turning the Channel into a maritime frontier, and how the lower sorts of maritime laborers—fishermen, smugglers, and privateers, among others—nevertheless continued to transgress, interact, and establish relationships across that border. By drawing on the “entangled histories” approach prevalent in studies of the Atlantic, Morieux intends to challenge the dominant “Second Hundred Years War” paradigm of eighteenth-century Anglo-French relations, which, he suggests gives too much credence to the eighteenth-century notion that such conflict was inherent rather than the outcome of historically contingent and negotiated processes and thus “privileges conflict over exchange, war over commerce, and draws far too neat a dividing line between war and peace” (2).

In part one, “The Border Invented,” Morieux takes up this theme by positing that until the late seventeenth century, people living in France and England would have had many reasons to believe they were historically connected. When intellectuals debated the origins of the waterway that divided the two kingdoms, they did so in terms of biblical time, suggesting that the separation of the two lands must be of relatively recent origin, perhaps stemming from the Flood but certainly postdating the time of human arrival in the British Isles. A providential God must have deliberately placed the two near to one another so that they could have commerce and improve the conditions of mankind. With the shift towards conceptualizing the history of the earth in geological time, however, the waterway was retheorized as ancient, predating human arrival in the islands and suggesting a more naturalized, permanent division between England and France. The waterway continued to carry a variety of labels (including the generic “Mer Oceane” as well as the more nationalized “Oceanus Britannicus” and “Le Canal de France”) until the 1690s, at which point both English and French mapmakers began much more frequently to describe it in their label of national choice; by the 1760s it was rare to see it termed anything other than the English Channel or La Manche.

In part two, “The Border Imposed,” Morieux examines the attempts by both kingdoms to strengthen their sovereignty and the reach of their bureaucracies into the Channel. This was particularly the case with the English, as they came to define their frontier as stretching into the water itself, while French state builders were more likely to define their territorial boundary as ending at the coastline. This question of the extent of sovereignty manifested itself in symbolic disputes—such as the insistence of the British Navy that its ships be saluted by all foreign vessels within the confines of the Channel—but also in efforts to regulate the behavior of subjects through defining legitimate prizes in war, constraining smuggling, and ensuring adequate national access to limited natural resources like seaweed and fish.

In part three, “Transgressing the Border,” Morieux argues that state attempts to impose control over borders and populations were often remarkably unsuccessful. He suggests that while historians have focused on elite-centered nationalisms as part of their attempts to explain Anglo-French rivalry, local identities trumped national ones in many maritime communities. He highlights such fascinating incidents of French fishing communities as Dieppe's and Boulogne's reaching out directly to English counterparts Hastings and Folkestone to negotiate truces during periods of war. While fishermen on both sides did at times petition the state to intervene against their foreign rivals, they were also likely to attack their local rivals using the same terms and arguments. Fishermen from Rochester complained about those from Chatham undermining a publicly useful nursery for seamen; oystermen from Breton complained about those from Normandy being “forains” [foreigners] who were illegitimately pillaging Breton oyster beds. States could also be complicit in blurring certain types of national lines: both France and England at times implicitly encouraged smuggling on the premise that it would draw off hard currency from the other. For many people, identity and community were points of reference that existed apart from strictly defined national borders. (It is presumably for this reason that Morieux speaks in terms of “England” rather than “Great Britain,” as a British identity would likely have been one step further distant than an English one.)

The Channel has a number of strengths. It is genuinely bicoastal in its sources, focus, and arguments. It connects with an impressively wide array of literatures, from the expected (state-building) to the surprising (the history of fossils). Morieux clearly articulates the stakes of his argument. He rightly insists on England's many connections to the Continent and reminds us that Anglo-French rivalry was not “natural” nor was it geographically determined. Ultimately, The Channel does not overturn the dominant paradigm of Anglo-French competition—it is too important a backdrop to the phenomena Morieux discusses. It is surely not a coincidence, for example, that it was in the 1690s—the first decade of the Second Hundred Years War—that state-sponsored French mapmakers produced as many maps of the Channel as in the previous three decades combined, or that this was the moment when they began to insist in ever increasing numbers on referring to it as “La Manche” rather than a variant such as “the English Sea.” Elite politics clearly did play a role in defining the zone of the Channel: they shaped the parameters of warfare, economic opportunity, and legal recourse that non-elites exploited to pursue their own agendas. However, Morieux makes a compelling argument for the value of studying the Channel from the sea up, as well as from the state down.