1779 / 1785 Map (after Mitchell) of the British Colonies in North America

This is an attractively engraved map (after Mitchell) of the British Colonies in North America, printed in Dublin by an anonymous printer to accompany a (plagiarized) history of the American Revolution.

A Closer Look

John Mitchell's monumental 1755 A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America - the map Lawrence Martin hailed as 'The Most Important Map in American History' - provided the source for this map. Indeed, the anonymous publishers could hardly have chosen a more apt source to copy. Despite the Mitchell map being twenty-five years old, it went through several updates and remained the map-of-record as the war came to a close. The Mitchell map was used by representatives of Great Britain and the United States at Paris while negotiating the treaty that ended the war. Thus, this reduced and simplified version was aptly chosen as a tool to acquaint readers with the theatre of American Revolutionary War (1775 - 1783).

Traces of the French and Indian War

Though this map appeared in a history of the American Revolution, the content of its source provided a better record of the French and Indian War (1754 - 1763). Consequently, the Ohio River Valley is rich in detail, identifying the numerous French forts and the handful of encroaching English forts. There are many notes similarly drawn from the Mitchell that explain British territorial claims, describe Native American tribes, and elucidate geographical points.

The Great Lakes

This map, as the Mitchell before it, drew on the Bellin/Charlevoix cartography for the Great Lakes, including the imaginary islands of Lake Superior. It is a comment on the chilling effect of the French and Indian War that English geographers had no better information on these lakes than that of the French explorers of the 1740s. As small as the distances appear to the modern eye, the Great Lakes fell beyond a contested frontier, and it was not until after the wars that better cartography would become available.

Our Kind of Pirates

This map appeared in a 1785 Dublin work entitled The History of the Wwar in America between Great Britain and her Colonies. This was pirated from Edmund Burke's An Impartial History of the War in America, collected in 1780 from his work in the 'Annual Register.' Unsurprisingly, the 'authors' of the plagiarized work did not make their identities known, instead flying the banner anonymously as 'The Company of Booksellers.'

Irish (book) Piracy

18th-century Dublin-based Irish publishing was a riotous and bustling affair fueled by vagaries in British copyright law. The 1709 English Copyright Act did not apply to Ireland at all: a further act of 1739 made it illegal for Irish reprints of English books to be sold in England, but did not prevent Irish publishers from selling such pirated works in Ireland or to the American colonies. Consequently, Dublin printers were able to publish - without payment to English authors or publishers - whatever printed works they thought salable. George Grierson’s ‘editions’ of Moll’s maps, as an example, benefited from this gaping loophole. Further efforts by London publishers to control Irish imprints of their work in 1785 came to naught, but the 1800 incorporation of Ireland into the United Kingdom brought the Copyright Act to bear, with the effect of virtually destroying Irish publishing (thanks, largely to their reliance on piracy as a business model.)

Publication History and Census

This map is scarce, and appears in OCLC separately only in the Library of Congress. The Company of Booksellers appears to have been successful, or at least ambitious, as the full volume is well represented in institutional collections.