Map style: Historical
By the middle of the eighteenth century, when this map was published, the dominions of the British Crown—the territory ruled by the British monarchs—extended from Hanover in Germany across the Atlantic to Newfoundland and south along the Atlantic coast of the Americas to St. Vincent and Barbados in the “Caribee Islands.” These are colored yellow on the map. The mapmaker used green to designate regions that “did anciently belong to the Crown of England.” These included provinces ruled by English kings in the late Middle Ages. The port of Calais—the last English possession in France—surrendered to the French in 1558.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain also controlled many other “Small Islands, Cities, Towns, Settlements” and “Factories.” The term factory in the eighteenth century referred to a trading post rather than a manufacturing facility. Factory took on its modern meaning during the Industrial Revolution. Among the “factories” depicted are forts on the African coast where slave traders from Britain and Britain’s American colonies trafficked in human beings to satisfy the labor demands of Britain’s colonies in the West Indies and the North American mainland. The African interior, which was not claimed by European colonizers until the nineteenth century, was poorly mapped and even less understood at this time. The mapmaker followed the conventions of the first half of the eighteenth century in labeling the south-facing coast of West Africa as “Guinea” and the region between Guinea and the Sahara as “Negroland.”
The British Empire of the mid-eighteenth century existed to build the wealth of the Crown and its subjects through trade. Dominion, carrying with it obligations to protect and govern, was a burden to the state. That burden was fairly light through mid-century, when the population of Britain’s colonies remained small and close to the sea—within reach of, and readily defended by, Britain’s powerful navy. The French and Indian War, in which Britain secured dominion over Canada and the vast region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, together with the movement of colonists toward the Appalachian frontier, imposed new and unwelcome costs.
The map bears no date, and dating it precisely poses an interesting scholarly problem. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) lists only five copies known to be in institutional collections—at the American Antiquarian Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the University of Chicago, the Florida State Library and the Wisconsin Historical Society. The American Antiquarian Society assigns a date of 1740; the John Carter Brown Library cites it as circa 1752; and the Wisconsin Historical Society dates it as “1759-1763?” It was clearly created before the 1763 Treaty of Paris, in which France surrendered Canada to Britain along with its claims to the trans-Appalachian West. Given that it makes no reference to the French and Indian War, it probably predates 1754. The publisher, cartographer Emanuel Bowen, was active throughout this period.
The copy depicted was offered for sale by Boston Rare Maps and differs from the copy owned by the John Carter Brown Library in the treatment of the green regions. On this map, former possessions of the English Crown in France are marked in green, as is Portugal. The latter is an error, but an understandable one. England and Portugal had been allies since 1385, when English archers fought alongside Portuguese soldiers to establish Portuguese independence. Charles II had married a Portuguese princess in 1662. Her dowry included the port of Bombay and trading privileges in Brazil and Portugal’s colonies in Asia. The alliance between the two countries was so well established that a contemporary might have assumed that Portugal “anciently” belonged to the English Crown. On the copy at the John Carter Brown Library, the former English possession in France are incorrectly labeled in yellow rather than green and Portugal is not marked.