In Herman Moll’s Compleat Geographer (1723), the engraved map of Ireland is accompanied by descriptive text that moves beyond geography. It tells the reader not only where Ireland’s rivers, towns, and counties lie, but also how its people were to be understood. In one striking passage, Moll writes that the inhabitants have been “brought over to the Customs and Fashions of the English, except in some Parts, where they live at a loose, unciviliz’d rate, and are therefore termed Wild Irish.”
This phrase, Wild Irish, was no casual remark. It carried with it the weight of two centuries of English colonial discourse. From the Tudor period onwards, English writers, administrators, and soldiers described the Gaelic Irish as “wild” in order to distinguish them from the supposedly “civil” settlers in the Pale or in newly planted towns. The label implied barbarity, lawlessness, and cultural deficiency—serving as both an insult and a justification. If the Irish were “wild,” then conquest, plantation, and re-education in English customs could be framed as acts of improvement rather than dispossession.
By Moll’s time, many of Ireland’s counties had long been under English control, yet the stereotype persisted. Including such language in a geography book gave it the stamp of authority, naturalising the idea that some parts of Ireland were inherently uncivilised. Just as the county lines on Moll’s map imposed a grid of order across the island, the text imposed a hierarchy of civilisation upon its people.
To modern readers and collectors, passages like this remind us that maps were never neutral. They were instruments of power—shaping how land was divided, how people were categorised, and how empire was justified. Moll’s neat engraving of Ireland is thus inseparable from the colonial worldview that defined it.