A Map of the British Empire in America, with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto

London: Sold by the Proprietors S[amuel] Harding on the Pavement in St. Martins Lane, and W[illiam] H[enry] Toms, Engraver in Union Court near Hatton Garden Holborn, 1734. Folio. (21 x 15 inches). Engraved folding key map in Babinski State 4, showing the track line of Spanish Galleons. Large engraved wall map on 15 double-page and 5 full-page map sheets, numbered in plate and in contemporary ink manuscript, in Babinski State 7, with Harding and Toms's imprint on map sheet 17, on laid paper with Strasbourg Lily watermarks. Ink manuscript sheet key opposite key map, which also carries ink manuscript configuration guidance. Finely bound to style in period diced quarter calf with tips on marbled paper boards, six raised bands forming seven gilt-ruled compartments with gilt-titling in second. A bound example of the largest eighteenth-century wall map of the Thirteen Colonies, and the first to name all thirteen. Popple's was the first detailed map of British, French, and Spanish colonial possessions in North America.

The most historically significant eighteenth-century cartographic work was the mapping of Colonial America. For the English, maps depicting territorial boundaries were vital due to claim conflicts with the French and Spanish. In this period, there was growing English concern over French explorations in the Mississippi Valley, which stimulated map production. Colonial officials needed accurate maps illustrating the land, waterways, forts, and settlements, but maps were also essential for domestic political reasons. They delineated and served to legitimize boundaries and helped define British economic interests in the New World. Popple's map of the British Empire in America, his only major cartographic work, was the largest printed map of the continent made during the colonial period. Popple produced this map under the auspices of Great Britain's Lord Commissioners of Trade and Plantations to help settle disputes arising from the rival expansion of English, Spanish, and French colonies. "France claimed not only Canada, but also territories drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries - in practical terms, an area of half a continent." [Goss] "Little is known of Henry Popple except that he came from a family whose members had served the Board of Trade and Plantations for three generations, a connection that must have been a factor in his undertaking the map." [McCorkle] Even with Popple's government connections, his map was not a commercial success until its publication was taken over by Toms and Harding in 1739. Regardless, it was of outsize historical importance. Popple's was the first map to name all the original Thirteen Colonies, and one of the first to show the new Colony of Georgia. The map was distributed by Great Britain's Board of Trade to the government of every colony in America. It was widely copied by other cartographers and remained the standard-bearer of North American maps for decades, in part because its issuance in both wall map and atlas forms allowed for a variety of usages. Benjamin Franklin, on May 22, 1746, ordered two copies of this map, "one bound the other in sheets," for the Pennsylvania Assembly. It was the only map of sufficient size and grandeur available. And the map is on a grand scale: if actually assembled it would result in a rectangle over eight feet square. Its coverage extends from the Grand Banks off Newfoundland to ten degrees west of Lake Superior, and from the Great Lakes to the north coast of South America. Several of the sections are illustrated with handsome pictorial insets, including views of New York City, Niagara Falls, Mexico City, and Quebec, and inset maps of Boston, Charles-Town, Providence, Bermuda, and a number of others.

Babinski, Henry Popple's 1733 map, State 4, 7. Brown, Early Maps of the Ohio Valley 14. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation 1955-408. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps 216, 217. Degrees of Latitude 24. Goss, The Mapping Of North America, p.122. McCorkle, America Emergent 21. McSherry, Two Centuries of Prints in America: 1680-1880.