How Herman Moll’s Map of Ireland Came to Be: Coercion, Control, and the Power of Mapping
When you hold an antique map of Ireland by Herman Moll, engraved in 1723, you are actually looking at the end product of a long and often brutal history of conquest, coercion, and administration. Moll himself never set foot in Ireland to draw its counties and towns. Instead, his work was built on more than a century of surveys carried out under English Crown authority—surveys that required the forced cooperation of local people, backed by soldiers, and designed to fix Ireland into an administrative grid.
Who was Moll?
Moll was a German-born engraver who arrived in London around 1678 and quickly reinvented himself as one of the city’s boldest map publishers. He cut his teeth engraving for others, but within a few years he was running his own print shop, producing crisp, practical maps that merchants, travellers, and gentlemen could actually use.
He moved in dazzling circles. He drank coffee at Jonathan’s Coffee House with Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, and with the buccaneer-turned-author William Dampier, whose voyages he illustrated. He knew Robert Hooke, the great experimental scientist, and antiquaries like William Stukeley. His maps carry traces of those conversations: polemical claims, allegorical figures, and a fierce defense of English imperial interests.
The Tudor Blueprint
From the late 1500s, Elizabethan surveyors such as Robert Lythe and Richard Bartlett were sent into Ireland. Their task was not neutral geography; it was war work. They mapped castles, fords, rivers, and clan territories so that English armies could better control the island. Bartlett, who mapped Ulster during the Nine Years’ War, was eventually killed by locals for his role in documenting lands destined for confiscation. Surveying was dangerous, political, and very far from impartial.
Coercion and the “Shiring” of Ireland
Counties—those neat divisions we see on Moll’s map—were not ancient Irish units. They were imposed, often cutting across Gaelic territories. Surveyors forced Gaelic lords and farmers to walk boundaries, translate place-names, and identify landmarks. The process was one of incorporation: turning Ireland’s fluid local geographies into fixed, taxable, governable “shires.” Local knowledge was extracted, often under duress, and converted into Crown property records.
Petty and the Down Survey
The most famous example came after Cromwell’s conquest. Between 1656 and 1658, Sir William Petty oversaw the “Down Survey,” the first attempt to measure an entire country, barony by barony, parish by parish. Petty’s men marched across bog and mountain with compasses and chains, recording acreages so that confiscated land could be redistributed to soldiers and creditors. The Down Survey was not about culture or science—it was about control, taxation, and dispossession.
From Manuscript to Atlas
By the time Herman Moll arrived in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, this infrastructure of information already existed. Moll was a compiler and engraver. He gathered data from state surveys, earlier printed maps like John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611), and Dutch atlases. What made him distinctive was clarity: Moll stripped away decoration and gave his readers sharp, legible maps that merchants, travellers, and scholars could use. But behind the clean lines of his 1723 Compleat Geographer lies a history of military conquest and coerced knowledge.
Why Map? The Benefits of Geography
For the English Crown, mapping Ireland brought several tangible benefits:
Military advantage: knowing the rivers, passes, and fortifications meant knowing how to conquer.
Taxation: maps allowed land to be measured, valued, and taxed efficiently.
Colonisation: confiscated lands in Munster and Ulster could be redistributed to settlers with legal maps as proof.
Legitimacy: once printed in atlases, the county divisions looked permanent, natural, inevitable.
To his rivals he could be abrasive, but to his audience he was invaluable. Moll gave eighteenth-century Britain not just maps, but a worldview—precise, political, and powerfully persuasive. He was of a long line of cartographers that were mainly used to establish control over foreign territories. For Moll’s eighteenth-century audience, maps of Ireland had a different appeal. They were tools of learning, status objects for the library, and symbols of England’s global reach.
In the end, Moll’s map of Ireland is a reminder that maps are never neutral. They are instruments of power. To collect them today is to preserve not only works of art and craft, but also documents of a contested past.