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The Channel
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 419

The Channel

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 Society of Prisoners
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 464

The Society of Prisoners

In the eighteenth century, as wars between Britain, France, and their allies raged across the world, hundreds of thousands of people were captured, detained, or exchanged. They were shipped across oceans, marched across continents, or held in an indeterminate limbo. The Society of Prisoners challenges us to rethink the paradoxes of the prisoner of war, defined at once as an enemy and as a fellow human being whose life must be spared. Amidst the emergence of new codifications of international law, the practical distinctions between a prisoner of war, a hostage, a criminal, and a slave were not always clear-cut. Renaud Morieux's vivid and lucid account uses war captivity as a point of departur...

Oceanic Histories
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 339

Oceanic Histories

Freshly presents world history through its oceans and seas in uniquely wide-ranging, original chapters by leading experts in their fields.

Resisting Napoleon
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 254

Resisting Napoleon

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2016-12-05
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The long war with Revolutionary France had a fundamental impact on British political culture. The most dramatic example of this is the mass mobilisation of the British people in response to French invasion threats throughout the last years of the century but, most spectacularly, in the period 1803-5, after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens, and the massing of an invasion fleet by Napoleon. The preparations for the threatened invasion had many dimensions including military and naval mobilization, the development of defensive earthworks and fortifications on the British Coast, the surveillance and monitoring of radicals identified with the French cause, the incitement of loyalist sentiment t...

Unsound Empire
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 299

Unsound Empire

  • Categories: Law

A study of the internal tensions of British imperial rule told through murder and insanity trials Unsound Empire is a history of criminal responsibility in the nineteenth-century British Empire told through detailed accounts of homicide cases across three continents. If a defendant in a murder trial was going to hang, he or she had to deserve it. Establishing the mental element of guilt--criminal responsibility--transformed state violence into law. And yet, to the consternation of officials in Britain and beyond, experts in new scientific fields posited that insanity was widespread and growing, and evolutionary theories suggested that wide swaths of humanity lacked the self-control and understanding that common law demanded. Could it be fair to punish mentally ill or allegedly "uncivilized" people? Could British civilization survive if killers avoided the noose?

History After Hobsbawm
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 361

History After Hobsbawm

What does it mean--and what might it yet come to mean--to write "history" in the twenty-first century? History After Hobsbawm brings together leading historians from across the globe to ask what being an historian should mean in their particular fields of study. Taking their cue from one of the previous century's greatest historians, Eric Hobsbawm, and his interests across many periods and places, the essays approach their subjects with an underlying sense of what role an historian might seek to play, and attempt to help twenty-first-century society understand "how we got here" They present new work in their sub-fields but also point to how their specialisms are developing, how they might further grow in the future, and how different areas of focus might speak to the larger challenges of history--both for the discipline itself and for its relationship to other fields of academic inquiry. Like Hobsbawn, the authors in this collection know that history matters. They speak to both the past and the present and, in so doing, introduce some of the most exciting new lines of research in a broad array of subjects from the medieval period to the present.

In a Sea of Empires
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 217

In a Sea of Empires

A history of imperial competition, colonial cooperation, and revolutionary currents in the maritime borderlands of the early nineteenth-century Caribbean.

The British Isles
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 379

The British Isles

Hugh Kearney's classic account of the history of the British Isles from pre-Roman times to the present is distinguished by its treatment of English history as part of a wider 'history of four nations'. Not only focusing on England, it attempts to deal with the histories of Wales, Ireland and Scotland in their own terms, whilst recognising that they too have political, religious and cultural divides. This new edition endeavours to recognise and examine contemporary multi-ethnic Britain and its implications for 'four-nations' history, making it an invaluable case study for European nationhood of the past and present. Thoroughly updated throughout to take into account recent social, political and cultural changes within Britain and examine the rise of multi-ethnic Britain, this revised edition also contains a completely new set of illustrations, including sixteen maps.

The Channel Islands in Anglo-French Relations, 1689-1918
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 311

The Channel Islands in Anglo-French Relations, 1689-1918

Examines how the Channel Islands have been crucial to Britain's successful maritime superiority in the English Channel. The Channel Islands have played a key role in both naval warfare and Anglo-French diplomacy, but this has not always been highlighted sufficiently even though Britain and France were at war for most of the period 1689-1815. This book considers a wide range of maritime subjects where the role of the Channel Islands has been significant, such as intelligence gathering, piracy and privateering, and naval strategy and control of the Channel. It also examines topics in relation to the Channel Islands specifically, such as surveying and hydrography, fortifications, trade and Chan...

Trading with the Enemy
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 423

Trading with the Enemy

A ground-breaking account of British and French efforts to channel their eighteenth-century geopolitical rivalry into peaceful commercial competition Britain and France waged war eight times in the century following the Glorious Revolution, a mutual antagonism long regarded as a “Second Hundred Years’ War.” Yet officials on both sides also initiated ententes, free trade schemes, and colonial bargains intended to avert future conflict. What drove this quest for a more peaceful order? In this highly original account, John Shovlin reveals the extent to which Britain and France sought to divert their rivalry away from war and into commercial competition. The two powers worked to end future conflict over trade in Spanish America, the Caribbean, and India, and imagined forms of empire-building that would be more collaborative than competitive. They negotiated to cut cross-channel tariffs, recognizing that free trade could foster national power while muting enmity. This account shows that eighteenth-century capitalism drove not only repeated wars and overseas imperialism but spurred political leaders to strive for global stability.