Professor Dunbabin will discuss his book, the Longest Boundary, which tells the story of how the course of what became the US-Canadian border was agreed. The process occurred in steps between 1763 and 1910, and took in episodes, like the 1790 Nootka Sound crisis, that had major impacts but seldom figure in accounts of Anglo-American relations. The talk will combine the book's general historical approach with an assessment of the main perspectives of international relations theory in the creation of the border.
John Dunbabin was for many decades Fellow and Tutor in Politics and Modern History at St Edmund Hall, and latterly also University Reader in International Relations. He retired in 2004 but continued to be academically involved. His previous books are Rural Discontent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1974), and International Relations since 1945, Vol. 1: The Cold War (2nd. edn. 2008) and Vol. 2: The Post-Imperial Age (1994). He has also published articles and chapters on a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, and twentieth-century world, history.
