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David Andress, Renaud Morieux. The Channel: England, France, and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 1, 1 February 2017, Pages 123–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.1.123
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Coasts are fractal things, showing new complexity at every level of magnification. States and nation-states, in particular, aspire to a more Euclidean geometry, where all is simple and regular. Nowhere is this taken further than in the common self-designation of France as “the Hexagon,” a figure that, in the honeycomb, has long stood as an emblem of unimprovable perfection of design. If in practice French administration never succeeded in reducing the country to a few straight lines, it is a truism of modern history that uniformity and centralization have been the direction of travel for the French since the days of absolutism. The British, by contrast, may be the world’s preeminent example of a state system constructed out of pure indifference to regularity and consistency. There is not, and never has been, one simple label that embraces all the peoples and territories of the British and Irish Isles, or the internal and external peculiarities of the state ruled from Westminster. This includes, for example, the fact that the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey and their smaller companions are dependencies of the British Crown, but not legally part of the UK or its predecessor states.
