But Sibbald’s story about linguistic history and national identity put trade, specifically trade in products derived from the land, center stage as a defining feature of British identity.114 Sibbald’s etymology sidestepped complicated questions about descent and relationships between historical and present-day British peoples—early modern discussions of the Brutus myth inevitably led to questions about which of the British peoples were the descendants of Brutus, with the result that some were excluded from the national mythology. Neither did this etymology denigrate the past inhabitants of Britain, as did Camden’s story about the blue-painted Britons. Though Sibbald well knew that tin was chiefly a product of one region of Britain, Cornwall, in this etymology, through the alchemy of international trade, all of Britain became identified with it.
Sibbald and Lhuyd’s work demonstrates that English, Scottish, and Welsh naturalists-antiquaries were capable of defining Britain as common ground. Ireland’s relationship to Britain, as represented in English topographical studies, was more vexed, as it was in life. Britain-as-projection-of-English-hegemony was most visible when English naturalists came to Ireland. On a most basic level, Ireland was divided from England, Scotland, and Wales by the sea; though the latter three could be defined “naturally” as one nation, it was more difficult to include Ireland in this way. The English had a long historical tradition of viewing the Irish as the other—the barbarians—against which they defined their own civility. In the early modern era, as this othering took on religious overtones with the rise of intense anti-Catholicism in Protestant Britain, it was increasingly taken up by the Welsh and the Scots as well.115
When Camden came to describe Ireland in detail, he depicted it as an island with a unique human and natural history that could not be fully covered by the label of Britain, as Scotland and England were, much less subsumed into England, as Wales sometimes was. In both the 1610 translation of Camden and its 1695 revision, discussion of Ireland was set off from the rest of the book by an interlude that represented the sea crossing to Ireland. At this point the name “Britain” was used to refer exclusively to England and Scotland. Furthermore, Ireland was never depicted as a potential equal, England’s partner in the matter of Britain, as Scotland was. Camden did not open the section on Ireland with a grand proclamation about the strength and peace to be found in political unity between England and Ireland. Instead he emphasized the wildness and incivility of the native Irish (as opposed to the “English-Irish,” settled in the Pale): contradictorily, they “love idlenesse and withal hate quitnes.”116 In Holland’s translation, Camden mourned that the Romans had never conquered Ireland, for surely they would have brought civility with them. He marveled at the contrast between the Irish medieval past, when Ireland boasted a vibrant, learned monastic culture (they had taught the English their letters), and now, when it was “rude, halfe-barbarous, and altogether voide of any polite and exquisite literature.”117 Other writers were even more extreme in their descriptions of the ancient Irish. Speed, in The theatre of the empire of Great Britain, touched on the diet of the ancient Britons. Based on descriptions collected from ancient writers, including Strabo, Solinus, and Pliny, he emphasized their “temperance of diet.” This he contrasted with the ancient Irish, who were cannibals. Accusations of cannibalism were commonly bandied about in the early modern European world as a way of marking off boundaries between civilized and uncivilized; in this particular case, Speed attributed the claim to St. Jerome.118
Overall, Camden’s history of Ireland put forward the argument that the conditions and actions of the native Catholic Irish easily justified their subordination to English rulers. Though Camden saw some bright spots in the Irish past, for him, the island began and ended in barbarousness, which he consistently opposed to the civility of the Romans and the English. Touching on more recent history, Camden devoted an entire chapter to the sixteenthcentury conflict between the Irish Earl of Tyrone and the English.119 He characterized the conflict as a “rebellion … begun upon private grudges and quarrels intermedled with ambition” that spread across Ireland under the “pretense of restoring libertie and Romish religion.”120 He regarded its English suppression as the basis for “firme peace, as we hope, for ever established.”121
These kinds of prejudices were replicated, and even more closely linked to projects for English imperial control of Ireland, in subsequent English topographical writings. In Gerard Boate’s 1652 Irelands Naturall History, published by Samuel Hartlib and dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, the native Irish hardly figured at all. According to the title page, the book was published “For the Common Good of Ireland, and more especially, for the benefit of the Adventurers and Planters therein.”122 In the dedication Hartlib expounded enthusiastically on the promise of the title page: a natural history of Ireland would be the greatest aid to the planters, soldiers, and adventurers colonizing Ireland in the wake of Cromwell’s conquests. Hartlib represented Ireland as a realm cleared for the free settlement of not only the Protestant English but Protestants from the Continent as well—exiled Bohemians and other refugees from the Thirty Years’ War.123 Neither the native Irish nor the Catholic Old English had a role to play in this new Ireland—in Hartlib’s Protestant vision, they were not even subordinate; they were invisible. Natural history, prosperity, and Protestant English colonization of Ireland were further linked in the Down Survey of Irish land, which William Petty conducted for Cromwell. Petty surveyed landownership as well as the quality and productivity of the land county by county in preparation for the transfer of much of that land from its Irish Catholic owners to soldiers in Cromwell’s army.124 Petty, though less anti-Catholic in theological terms than Hartlib, nonetheless saw Roman Catholicism as an impediment to the increase of trade in Ireland, as Adam Fox has observed.125 Petty also maintained the link between topographical knowledge, the improvement of trade, and English imperial dominance in Ireland (and elsewhere).126 Through the Restoration he plied Charles II and other influential members of the court with reports, grounded in his new methods of “political arithmetic,” encouraging the Crown to take a strong hand in displacing Irish Catholics with Protestant English planters.127
However, the story of the establishment of Ireland’s place within England’s Britain cannot be told solely in terms of English efforts to establish imperial dominance. The case of William Molyneux indicates that further complexities inhered in the production of topographical studies of Ireland. Molyneux was from a wealthy, Protestant Anglo-Irish family with roots in Calais. As a student at Trinity College Dublin, he became interested in natural philosophy and mathematics. After a stint in London studying law at the Middle Temple, he returned home, where he founded the Dublin Philosophical Society, modeled on the Royal Society, in 1683. Like Sibbald and Lhuyd, Molyneux maintained an extensive correspondence with British naturalists. As secretary of the Dublin Philosophical Society, he exchanged letters and meeting minutes with the Royal Society and the Oxford Philosophical Society.128
Topography was one of Molyneux’s many scientific interests. He served for a time as surveyor-general and chief engineer for Dublin, and he took responsibility for the Irish sections of the bookseller Moses Pitt’s English Atlas.129 Pitt’s Atlas was to be a luxury product, a complete, up-to-date atlas of the world in eleven volumes, but only four volumes were ever published. Expected to include six hundred plates, the project failed on account of exorbitant production costs of as much as one thousand pounds per volume, compounded by financial losses Pitt incurred through his misadventures in real estate development.130 In promoting the project, Pitt advertised the support of Charles II, his brother the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, the Royal Society, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The maps, made from plates that had been engraved earlier in the century for Dutch cartographer Johannes Janssonius’s Atlas major but partially recut based on the latest available knowledge, were to be accompanied by reams of historical and topographical information, at least some of it newly collected. Leading scholars, including Christopher Wren, John Pell, Robert Hooke, Thomas Gale, and Isaac Vossius, signed on to advise Pitt and monitor his progress.131
Though