When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500–1800 (review)

During the past quarter-century, Scott has established a firm reputation as a scholar of the political history of Stuart England, with particular emphasis on republicanism, the instability caused by the English Civil War, the fall and execution of Charles I, the failure of the Cromwellian regime, the restoration of the monarchy, and the achievement of stability under the Anglo-Dutch political revolution of 1688/89. He has pursued these themes in such books as England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (New York, 2000) and Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (New York, 2004). While these works have been in gestation, early modern British history has witnessed an upsurge in the study of its Atlantic dimension, especially with regard to colonization, trade, and empire. In this new book, Scott takes account of this “Atlantic turn” in historiography.

When the Waves Ruled Britannia extends Scott’s interest and expertise in this era by focusing on theorists and annalists who used geographical language for political ends. The book is interdisciplinary in combining the analysis of texts concerning the geography of islands, continents, and internal regions with examination of the politics of state power and national identity, notably in relation to the growth of naval power, the exigencies of warfare, and the struggle to create a strong, viable maritime nation. Scott draws upon printed primary texts by numerous authors, including Dee, Camden, Hakluyt, Purchas, and Heylyn; unpublished manuscript essays, principally in the British Library and the National Maritime Museum; and a selective, relevant bibliography of secondary material.¹

Scott does not explain why he selected particular primary texts and omitted others. For example, he does not mention the writings of Postlethwayt, which include extensive information on England’s maritime and naval strength in the eighteenth century vis-à-vis state power.² Nor does he provide consistent information about the selected writers’ absorption of one another’s arguments, the nature of their audience, or their influence on government policy. Rather, he uses the primary texts to illuminate the main themes pursued in the book. Scott’s reading of individual sources is sophisticated and insightful, but sometimes he presents too much direct quotation; some of his passages are little more than a series of pithy quotations with little linking commentary (see 22–24, 51–52, 66–67, 107–109).

Proceeding in a generally chronological direction from Elizabethan texts using geographical language for political purposes to Georgian texts following the same precepts, Scott shows how England’s island status was conceptualized, redefined, and promoted as a way of fostering national identity and British overseas maritime expansion throughout the early modern period. English seafaring and navigation had limitations in the sixteenth century; war exposed the fragility of the state’s defences. Dee and Hakluyt both advocated boosting England’s economic and political strength by concentrating on the nation’s geographical position as an island and its need to expand overseas to increase its power and prestige. Hakluyt, in particular, regarded the colonization of North America as an opportunity for England to establish a Protestant counterbalance to the Spanish Roman Catholic Empire in South and Central America. Dee, Hakluyt, and some of their contemporaries tried to “drive the nation into a dynamic relationship with the sea and its mobility” (53).

Seventeenth-century English writers used geographical language to emphasize the importance of “the discipline of the sea” to boost the economic, military, and political prospects of the English state (xiii). The Cromwellian period displayed “a republic and empire fully apprised of its mercantile and naval interests and potential” (72). During the eighteenth century, writers touted Britain’s maritime strength—for example, Daniel Defoe in his commentaries about ports and river improvements in A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain . . . (London, 1724–1727) and John Oldmixon, who argued that colonies such as Barbados exemplified British maritime power in The British Empire in America . . . (London, 1741). Scott...