(he also served Charles and his brother James as a royal physician). Sibbald was charged with producing maps, a natural history, and a study of the antiquities of Scotland. The warrant for his appointment emphasized the contribution that accurate, detailed geographical knowledge would make to husbandry and trade.106 The warrant’s emphasis, however, was very much on His Majesty’s kingdom of Scotland, not on Scotland within a broader British context. Yet Sibbald, like Lhuyd, was enmeshed in a pan-British correspondence: at various periods in his life he lived in London, and he corresponded with virtuosi in England and Scotland who shared his interests.107 As an Episcopalian for most of his life (with the exception of a brief period during which he identified as Catholic), Sibbald, unlike many Scots, was generally aligned with rather than opposed to the Anglican Church.108 Sibbald also collaborated with Gibson on the 1695 Britannia, providing new material for the sections on Scotland and the outer British Isles. In his additions Sibbald documented the crossborder links between England and Scotland, noting, for example, that in the shire of Teviotdale, people supported themselves by trading cattle, sheep, and wool with the English across the border.109
Sibbald’s engagement in the project of constructing the topographical Britain can be seen in his promotion of a newer etymology for “Britain,” one in keeping with the fundamental precept of natural history, that knowledge of nature was the foundation of trade, economic improvement, and British political and cultural identity. The medieval Brutus myth, which suggested that the British were descended from a hero of the Trojan War, had been dying even in Camden’s day. Camden had promoted an etymology that traced Britain to the ancient British word for “blue” because some of the ancient inhabitants of Britain—the Picts—had painted their bodies blue with plant-based dyes.110 This derivation was reprinted in the 1695 Britannia (much of the 1695 copy was taken from Holland’s 1610 translation, rather than being retranslated).111 Later in the book, however, Sibbald discussed an alternative etymology of Britain in his essay on the “Thule of the Ancients.” This was included near the end of the 1695 Britannia in the section that dealt with Britain’s outer northwestern islands. In this essay Sibbald attempted to pin down the physical island that corresponded to “Thule,” an island that, for classical Greek and Roman writers, marked the northwestern edge of the known world. Toward the end Sibbald repeated a claim, which he credited to the seventeenth-century French biblical scholar Samuel Bochart, that Britain was derived (via Greek) from the ancient Phoenician word for “Land of Tinn,” on the theory that tin was the most important product that Mediterranean civilizations would have obtained from Britain through trade.112
One might see Sibbald’s etymology as a descendant of the Brutus myth, in the sense that it retained a whiff of the prestige of the classical origins story while updating it to make it plausible for a late seventeenth-century audience. Sibbald was not the only one to link the ancient British to the ancient Phoenicians, who were, like the early modern British, seagoing traders: the disreputable antiquary Aylett Sammes went him one better in his Britannia antiqua illustrata (1676), claiming that the customs and language of the early British were deeply shaped by commercial contact with the Phoenicians.113 Aubrey’s and Lhuyd’s attempts to read ancient British as a species of ancient Greek and Inigo Jones’s to impute Roman origins to Stonehenge also come to mind as efforts to create a lineage in which the British were linked to, if not descended from, ancient Mediterranean peoples.
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
