That great poet of islands, Derek Walcott, said it best, “The anchor of the islands went deep but was always clear in the sand” (The Arkansas Testament, 1987, 34). Islands have long served as metaphors of belonging defined by the experience of islandness, and the boundary of land and ocean. At the same time, islands are places of passage, cultural and biological mixing, platforms for the political calculations of empires, and nodes in commercial networks. This braiding of an identity deeply rooted in place and yet also entwined with the larger motions of the world informs this two-volume history of the Isle of Man for the period 1405−1830. These books are the most recent entries in the New History of the Isle of Man, a six-volume project surveying the island from prehistorical times to the near-present (the first appearing in 2001). Thirteen subject chapters, many coauthored, present a comprehensive, multifaceted history of the island that extensive illustrations and helpful maps enrich. These volumes are required reading for those interested in the Isle of Man and for researchers seeking to strengthen an archipelagic perspective on the history of the British Isles.
The collection is also a much-needed intervention. This period in the history of Man, Tim Thornton declares in his introduction, has often been “overlooked” even by local historians (1.1). British historians, likewise, typically encounter the island (if at all) because of the adventuresome smugglers who sailed from its ports. But Man is a special place and deserving of much more attention. Located in the center of the Irish Sea, it is said that from Snaefell, its highest mountain, observers can view six kingdoms. Locals will remind you that Man is among them.
The contributors to the first volume, dedicated to Man's constitutional and political history, explain this unusual status. Invaded by Vikings around 900 CE, the island was the center of the Norse kingdom of Mann and the Isles. Native institutions that emerged during this period endured. For example, the annual assembly of the Tynwald is said to be the world’s oldest continuous parliament. The island was eventually sold to the Scottish king for 100 marks annually in 1266—not the last time Man was transacted in the larger game of empires. Warfare with the English led to the seizure of the island and the grant of the lordship to John Stanley and his heirs, the earls of Derby, in 1405. The Stanleys would hold the island with only a brief interruption until the failure of the male line in 1736. Inherited next by the Murray Dukes of Atholl, Man would be sold again in 1765 and revested to the English crown. We can immediately spy the tensions that the chapters in the first volume explore in detail over the centuries. This was a history shaped by the competing military and diplomatic interests of England and Scotland, the mainly financial interests of the lord, and the interests of those who lived on the island, the Native Manx community.
The opening essay by Thornton seeks to define organizing narratives to structure this complex interplay and to revise the highly influential history of Man published in 1900 by A.W. Moore. The anticolonial struggles being waged in Ireland deeply influenced Moore, but he found in the early modern period little to recommend Man to a narrative of Gaelic revival. Instead, its once independent lordship had been subordinated to English control with little local resistance save a brief period during the 1640s and 1650s. This was a dreary story of Native decline and overweening English influence.
Thornton and his coauthors write convincingly to revise this account, describing instead the “consolidation of traditional Manx political and legal structures” and their growth during the period (1.13). Man was not a supine satellite of England, but was often more closely connected, even in English minds, to Scotland and the wider Gaelic world. The native Manx community had a voice and acted to defend their interests, leading to wider effects.
Although the chapters in the first volume are largely and understandably structured as a chronological history of the lordship, we can see how foreign and local interests interacted and often clashed on the island. For example, when the Stanley lords sought to maximize their island rents, the Manx resisted, eventually resulting in the landmark Act of Settlement (1704). Consequently, the Stanleys turned to the customs as their major source of revenue. The smuggling economy soon rapidly expanded as Man became a transshipment hub for all points around the Irish Sea. These activities finally led the British government to pressure Atholl to sell his lordship, exactly at the time when they were beginning a similar campaign of customs enforcement in the American colonies. The Manx, who were not consulted and whose subsequent experience of British rule is compellingly discussed by Kit Gawne, received the revestment in 1765 as an act of betrayal.
Several major transformations over the centuries emerge from the narratives of the first volume. Although most of the chapters are taken up with the power plays and family bickering of the Stanleys and Murrays, they also point to the growth of Native Manx institutions and even political identity. This is a narrative of constitutional development (summarized in a concluding eighth chapter by William Cain) that at points mirrors England and Scotland, especially in the growing authority of representative institutions on the island such as the (unelected) House of Keys, which represented the Commons in the Tynwald, and the shift from custom to written law. This story could be told more crisply and perhaps with greater focus on the Manx themselves. For example, the discussion of the Manx rebel leader William Christian, defender of the island’s “rights and liberties” (1.115), is surprisingly light (though his portrait is reproduced twice).
The second volume on the economic and social history of the island brings us closer to the ground. The opening chapter by J.R. Dickinson offers granular detail on Man’s economy from its export of hides to its important herring fishery, to the delight of specialists. Dickinson also describes the island's development as a center of commercial trade and provides an extended treatment of smuggling. The running trade was a prominent issue attached to early-modern Man as well as the present-day historiography. Chapters 6 and 7 in the first volume, by Gawne, provide additional overviews of the business of contraband. Gawne intriguingly discusses the intersection between the island's smuggling and the slave trade, though these chapters suggest that much remains to be learned about the island’s economy. One vignette describes how George Moore, an important Manx merchant, upon discovering that Douglas, a “slave servant” had intercourse with a cook in his dairy in 1754, promptly ordered him sold abroad (1.226). This episode, of course, raises a deeper question: is there a history of enslaved persons on Man?
Nigel Yates and his coauthors discuss the island church in chapter 2, examining the lived piety of the Manx and offering a thorough account of institutional development. The authors give careful attention to the growth of Methodism on the island and discuss the communities of other nonconformists, including Quakers. Subsequent chapters on daily life, and arts and culture, primarily by Michael Hoy and Fenella Bazin in chapters 3 and 4, are particularly stimulating. The environment of the island, its rhythms, entertainments, education and economic practices are discussed in significant detail. Importantly, we gain glimmers of a biological transformation as newer, usually English, breeds displaced native Manx animals (some readers may be disappointed that the Manx cat eludes mention). The final, fifth chapter by Catriona Mackie and contributors—describing the landscape and built environment—authoritatively explains the history of land use and urban development on the island. Hints are again dropped of a relationship to the wider Agricultural Revolution though the mechanisms of intellectual exchange remain blurry.
Yet even more so than the first volume, the contributors to the second volume are keen to identify new pathways for research. Chapter 4, on arts and culture, is particularly rich in this regard as its analysis underscores the distinctiveness and depth of Manx culture and language (Manx Gailck). Man also has a fascinating local folklore, although the principal early source, published by a bored agent for the English Customs in 1726, is of dubious value. Throughout their chapters, other contributors to the second volume highlight an exciting array of additional pathways to investigate, including research into Manx Gaelic sermons, the impact of crime on the island, and largely untapped sources, such as ecclesiastical court records and pictorial evidence. Two other major areas that are briefly but invitingly treated in the volumes also suggest opportunities for further research. The legal system beyond the ecclesiastical courts could shed light on everyday disputes and conflicts. Immigration to the island clearly had a significant impact. Gawne, for example, acknowledges the “lucrative policy of encouraging immigration” (1.235), but discussion is spare. Yet immigrants, who often came for commercial purposes and Manx’s lax debtor laws, retained networks throughout the Irish Sea that brought commerce and probably new ideas to the island.
Finally, there is a touch of sadness at the passing of so many contributors who are memorialized in the dedication, perhaps reflecting the long gestation of the project. Yet their scholarship will serve to inspire a new generation of scholars of Man and researchers outside the island seeking to integrate its history into wider narratives. They will find, surely, that the anchor of this island runs deep.
