political content of a variety of English and, later, Scottish geographies. YetEnlightenment Geography's closest kin are not Margarita Bowen's Empiricism andGeographical Thought (Cambridge, 1981) or David Livingstone's The GeographicalTradition (Oxford, 1992) but rather the most sophisticated recent extensions of thehistory of political thought to neighbouring ®elds, such as Ian Bostridge'sWitchcraft andits Transformations, c. 1650±1750 (Oxford, 1997) or Colin Kidd'sBritish Identities BeforeNationalism (Cambridge, 1999). Mayhew's approach to ideology fruitfully reveals theconservatism of English geographers in the long wake of Heylyn; his impressively widecommand of the recent historiography of early modern British intellectual and politicalhistory also draws his subjects into meaningful dialogue with their historical contem-poraries. As a result, his book is consistently trenchant, focused and persuasive.Geographers and historians alike might questionMayhew's principles of selection (albeitfor different reasons) but they will be equally enlightened by his close mapping oflittle-known terrain. The avowed aim of Enlightenment Geography is to alert geographersto alternative genealogies for their discipline; it should have the equally salutary effect ofencouraging historians to embrace an intellectual canon they (along with mostgeographers) have generally overlooked.

Columbia University David Armitage

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0470, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000. Pp. xi� 239. £12 � 95 paperback)

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In a wholly brilliant book which transforms our understanding of the intellectual historyof the British empire (and as a consequence, of British history more generally) fromc. 1540 to 1740, David Armitage seeks to trace the emergence of the conception of theBritish empire as a maritime, commercial, free and Protestant political congeries ofpeoples spread across the globe which was to acquire such signi®cance in the twocenturies after his narrative concludes. As such, the `British Empire' he traces is both ageographical and an ideological entity: geographical, in that his story is of the change inusage of that term from the archipelagic context of the British Isles to a transatlanticcontext (and in due course, although it is beyond his scope, to a more broadlytransoceanic context); and ideological, in that his main preoccupation is with the politicaldebates by which a conception of empire as commercial, free and Protestant emerged.

Starting with the geographical element of Armitage's tale, the notion of a `BritishEmpire' emerged in English political discourse in the 1540s, in the context of HenryVIII's and then Somerset's attempts to force a union of crowns with Scotland. In a formof geographical determinism which was to become a familiar trope in British geography,they argued that Scotland and Englandwere `naturally' a united entity: a `British Empire'in the sense of an empire unto itself, bounded by the seas. One thing that becomesapparent as Armitage spans the decades and centuries, is just how remarkably persistentthis archipelagic de®nition of the `British Empire' was, still being dominant in the earlyeighteenth century. A powerful implicit warning which emerges from The IdeologicalOrigins of the British Empire is against assuming that spatial languages are ®xed over timeand therefore transparent to the present-day inquirer. The dominant usage of the term`British Empire' in the sixteenth, seventeenth and even early-eighteenth century does notmap onto our assumptions in terms of its geographical domain of application: that termapplied to the British Isles as an empire, not to the plantations and trading outpostswhich the British had established in other parts of the world. We need to be cautious in

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the evidence we invoke, then, when talking about the `British Empire': synonymyoperates at the level of words (as the term implies), not concepts. As Armitage writes inone of his many thought-provoking historiographical asides, ``present usage or practiceoffers no sure guide to the origins of a concept or activity'' (p. 5).

The other powerful geographical problematic with which Armitage engages is alsoalready emergent in the context of the 1540s and rami®es down British history: this ®rstdeployment of the term `British Empire' was in the context of an Anglo-Scottish politicalcontretemps, and throughout his narrative the spaces in which political languages weredeployed were important to their development. For example, Britain's distinctiveattitude to the seas, which argued that global shipping lanes should be open to all butalso enforced restrictive NavigationActs in a colonial context, is shown to be the result ofa fusion of Scottish doctrines of a closed sea with English advocacy of a free sea at theUnion of Crowns under James VI/I. As such, if Armitage shows that the concept of a`British Empire' was predominantly an archipelagic affair, he also shows how themultiple kingdoms context of that British archipelago led to the development of thedistinctive components which would be incorporated into a global conception of thatsame concept in the eighteenth century, the conception which we take for granted whenconsidering the term `British Empire'.

Conceptually, Armitage's analysis shows that the political problematic as de®ned byRepublicanism, in Sallust and as updated by Machiavelli, was that empire and libertywere antithetical categories. How, then, did British political thought fuse empireand liberty? Milton remained within the Republican nexus in the 1650s, but twomodes of argument allowed the British to fuse these concepts in the later seventeenthcentury. First, it was suggested that a maritime empire could preserve liberty, rather thandegenerating to tyranny, as the land empires such as Rome had done. Second, an empirefor trade rather than mere sovereignty could square the circle of liberty and empire.Hereby, a central plank of the British rhetoric of empire was constructed in response to arepublican conundrum. Religion's role was different. In a brilliant analysis, Armitageseeks to show that Richard Hakluyt's work was unconcerned with developing aProtestant theory of empire, his aim being to advocate empire as a way to generateEnglish self-suf®ciency, his grounding for this being his Oxonian Aristotelianism.Likewise even the more theologically informed writings of Samuel Purchas, while rabidlyanti-Catholic, never sought to establish Protestant faith as a ground on which tolegitimate empire; indeed, Purchas drew on Spanish Thomism (and therefore, of course,Catholicism) to construct his critique. As such, Armitage suggests that it was only in theeighteenth century that the British empire came to be con®gured as distinctivelyProtestant, and it was only in the century following that Hakluyt was assigned his role asthe propagandist of such a vision. As with the conundrum about liberty and empire, then,it is classicism which drives the language of empire.

If the British empire did come to be seen as Protestant, free, commercial and maritime,it only did so in response to the exigencies of political debate in the 1730s, albeit drawingon the conceptual resources which the previous centuries of political argumentationprovided. Interestingly, this nexus of ideas originated in the provinces, not themetropolis, with colonial administrators generating this conception, which was thentransposed into opposition rhetoric in London. As with the 1540s and the 1600s, then, thediverse spaces in which political discourse was enacted proved conceptually fruitful.Yet even as this image was being developed, so others such as Francis Hutchesonand David Hume contested it, and it would come under ®re again in the years after theSeven Years War.

Two reservations must be expressed about Armitage's argument. First, his preoccu-pation is with the lines of argument in Republican thought which debated empire, butthere is a tendency to see Republicanism as the only matrix of relevance. But surely otherframeworks of early modern British political thought were not wholly mute on mattersimperial: the language of the common law and of Anglicanism were players on this stage.

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For example, even if Hakluyt and Purchas did not develop a Protestant theory of empire,surely their anti-Catholicism is not to be dismissed as simply negative. On the contrary, itforged a dominant self-image of British empire in both its archipelagic and transoceanicincarnations. To deny that Hakluyt or Purchas developed a Protestant theory of empirebecause they did not justify empire in terms of grace, and because they drew on SpanishCatholic sources, is surely to predetermine what a Protestant theory of empire must looklike, ®nd it does not exist, and ignore these writers' own self-images as Protestants. Evenif Hakluyt's structure of argument was more Aristotelian than Protestant, we cannotdismiss his appeal to religion as `̀ disingenuous'' (p. 71) as Armitage does; the fact that hemade such an appeal at all surely suggests something about the intellectual culture inwhich Hakluyt wrote and his desire to link imperial reasoning to religion. In short, whileArmitage's account of the republican lineage of imperial ideas is compelling, he seems toowilling to see this as the only lineage available, and to foreclose on other options. This isonly to say that there might be stories of the emergence of empire as fascinating asArmitage's own, from different political orbits. His picture is one of plural and contestedpolitical discourses developing competing conceptions of empire, and this might beapplied back to in¯ect his own argument.

Second, in a historiographical sense Armitage's tale is Hamlet without the prince.His narrative is designed to lead us to the development of a `modern' political conceptionof the British empire in the 1730s but several things become clear from his argument: ®rst,that this really was a product of that decade, and while it drew upon previously developedintellectual resources, it was born of contingency; secondly, it was contested, relegatedand then revived over the course of subsequent decades. As such, it is unclear whyArmitage rests somuchweight on what emerged in the 1730s as a terminus ad quem: it wasno more stable or lasting than previous conceptions of the `British Empire'. By the timethat elements of this conception were revived in the nineteenth century, they were beinginvoked in utterly transformed political contexts. It is the power of Armitage's argumentthat he shows that British imperial identity, something recent debates about identity havetaken as a stable given, was shifting, contingent and ephemeral. In this context, it isregrettable that he seems to reify the end point of his story as a stable identity which wasfounded out of the political culture of the 1730s, rather than simply picturing this as onemore nexus of ideas, which was to be broken up and reused in subsequent decades.

But it must be stressed that these reservations are simply a regret, ®rst that Armitagehas not analysed more of the lines of descent of ideas of a `British Empire' to complementthat so compellingly provided for Republican ideas, and secondly that he has not takenthe contingent and contextual logic of his own approach through to the conclusion of hisnarrative, rather than seeking to provide a stable end point. In a sense it is a call for morein the same idiom, for The Ideological Origins of the British Empire is quite the mostsubtle, compelling and intelligent treatment of the `British Empire' that exists to myknowledge.

University of Wales, Aberystwyth Robert J. Mayhew

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0471, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Vladimir Jankovic ,Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of EnglishWeather 1650±1820(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv� 272. £16 � 99 paperback)

This fascinating review of the cultural history of what Jankovic terms `̀ meteoricreportage'' (p. 3) is an essential read for all those interested in the historical geography ofseventeenth and eighteenth century England. The book is full of painstaking scholarship