Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees Book

I "heavily skimmed" this, but I didn't just sit down and read the thing. The nitty gritty details aren't really relevant to my studies of MY border, the northeastern US/Canada border, it's more the general ideas. The general ideas are quite useful. For example, this 17th/18th century obsession with the idea of "natural frontiers" that sounds logical if you don't think about it too long, but inevitably falls apart at the local level. If you are dealing with one river, sure, but trying to make a mountain range into a natural frontier and dealing with dueling watersheds, etc, just gets chaotic. Also this idea of concentric circles of identity (which I'm pretty sure Sahlins got from another historian, I just can't remember who). People on the border might have a strong regional identity (Catalan, for example) and they might think of themselves as part of that group first, but that doesn't necessarily prevent them from using a French or Spanish identity as the case arises. That was the main takeaway for me from this book - it's all about what identity one needs to use to get things. When groups are either complaining to the state or asking the state for something, that's when they create an identity as "Spanish" or "French." You need to, if you want the state to do anything for you. So national identity comes out of these local disputes and local class interests. When a rich person has property on either side of the border and wants to have it both ways, the common folk revolt. We are French, they say, and this rich person isn't like us. When two villages are in competition, even if they are in close proximity, it is easy to try and pull the "We are Spanish, they are foreigners" card. I like this idea of common people using national language to try and get what they want.