Names of the British Isles

This article is about the use of the toponym "British Isles". For the confusion between different geopolitical terminology within the British Isles, see Terminology of the British Isles.

Satellite photo: Ireland is the island on the left and Great Britain is on the right

The toponym "British Isles" refers to a European archipelago comprising Great Britain, Ireland and the smaller, adjacent islands.[1] The word "British" has also become an adjective and demonym referring to the United Kingdom[2] and more historically associated with the British Empire. For this reason, the name British Isles is avoided by some, as such usage could be interpreted to imply continued territorial claims or political overlordship of the Republic of Ireland by the United Kingdom.[3][4][5][6][7]

Alternative names that have sometimes been coined for the British Isles include "Britain and Ireland",[3][8][9] the "Atlantic Archipelago",[10] the "Anglo-Celtic Isles",[11][12] the "British-Irish Isles",[13] and the Islands of the North Atlantic.[14] In documents drawn up jointly between the British and Irish governments, the archipelago is referred to simply as "these islands".[15]

To some[according to whom?], the reasons to use an alternate name is partly semantic, while, to others, it is a value-laden political one.[16] The Channel Islands are normally included in the British Isles by tradition, though they are physically a separate archipelago from the rest of the isles.[17][18] United Kingdom law uses the term British Islands to refer to the UK, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man as a single collective entity.

An early variant of the term British Isles dates back to Ancient Greek times, when they were known as the Pretanic or Britannic Islands. It was translated as the British Isles into English in the late 16th or early 17th centuries by English and Welsh writers, whose writings have been described as propaganda and politicised.[19][20][21]

The term became controversial after the breakup of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1922. The names of the archipelago's two sovereign states were themselves the subject of a long dispute between the Irish and British governments.

  1. ^ "British Isles". Encyclopedia Britannica. 4 February 2020. British Isles, group of islands off the northwestern coast of Europe. The group consists of two main islands, Great Britain and Ireland, and numerous smaller islands and island groups,
  2. ^ Walter, Bronwen (2000). Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place, and Irish Women. New York: Routledge. p. 107. A refusal to sever ties incorporating the whole island of Ireland into the British state is unthinkingly demonstrated in naming and mapping behaviour. This is most obvious in continued reference to 'the British Isles'.
  3. ^ a b Hazlett, Ian (2003). The Reformation in Britain and Ireland: an introduction. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-567-08280-0. At the outset, it should be stated that while the expression 'The British Isles' is evidently still commonly employed, its intermittent use throughout this work is only in the geographic sense, in so far as that is acceptable. Since the early twentieth century, that nomenclature has been regarded by some as increasingly less usable. It has been perceived as cloaking the idea of a 'greater England', or an extended south-eastern English imperium, under a common Crown since 1603 onwards. ... Nowadays, however, 'Britain and Ireland' is the more favoured expression, though there are problems with that too. ... There is no consensus on the matter, inevitably. It is unlikely that the ultimate in non-partisanship that has recently appeared the (East) 'Atlantic Archipelago' will have any appeal beyond captious scholars.
  4. ^ Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology by Judith Jesch 2003
  5. ^ Myers, Kevin (9 March 2000). "An Irishman's Diary". The Irish Times. millions of people from these islands – oh how angry we get when people call them the British Isles
  6. ^ "Geographical terms also cause problems and we know that some will find certain of our terms offensive. Many Irish object to the term the 'British Isles';..." The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict and emancipation. Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd. Cambridge University Press. 1996
    Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490–1700. (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2003): "the collection of islands which embraces England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales has commonly been known as the British Isles. This title no longer pleases all the inhabitants of the islands, and a more neutral description is 'the Atlantic Isles'" (p. xxvi). On 18 July 2004, The Sunday Business Post Archived 10 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine questioned the use of British Isles as a purely geographic expression, noting:

    [The] "Last Post has redoubled its efforts to re-educate those labouring under the misconception that Ireland is really just British. When British Retail Week magazine last week reported that a retailer was to make its British Isles debut in Dublin, we were puzzled. Is not Dublin the capital of the Republic of Ireland?. When Last Post suggested the magazine might see its way clear to correcting the error, an educative e-mail to the publication...:

    Retrieved 17 July 2006

    "... (which) I have called the Atlantic archipelago – since the term 'British Isles' is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously." Pocock, J. G. A. [1974] (2005). "British History: A plea for a new subject". The Discovery of Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 29. OCLC 60611042.
    "... what used to be called the "British Isles", although that is now a politically incorrect term." Finnegan, Richard B.; Edward T. McCarron (2000). Ireland: Historical Echoes, Contemporary Politics. Boulder: Westview Press, p. 358.

    "In an attempt to coin a term that avoided the 'British Isles' – a term often offensive to Irish sensibilities – Pocock suggested a neutral geographical term for the collection of islands located off the northwest coast of continental Europe which included Britain and Ireland: the Atlantic archipelago..." Lambert, Peter; Phillipp Schofield (2004). Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline. New York: Routledge, p. 217.

    "..the term is increasingly unacceptable to Irish historians in particular, for whom the Irish Sea is or ought to be a separating rather than a linking element. Sensitive to such susceptibilities, proponents of the idea of a genuine British history, a theme which has come to the fore during the last couple of decades, are plumping for a more neutral term to label the scattered islands peripheral to the two major ones of Great Britain and Ireland." Roots, Ivan (1997). "Union or Devolution in Cromwell's Britain". History Review.

  7. ^ The A to Z of Britain and Ireland by Trevor Montague "...although it is traditional to refer to the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as the British Isles, when considered as a single archipelago, this nomenclature implies a proprietary title which has long since ceased to exist, if indeed it ever really did exist. Despite the very close affinity between the British and Irish people I have no doubt that my title is both expedient and correct".
  8. ^ Davies, Alistair; Sinfield, Alan (2000), British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945–1999, Routledge, p. 9, ISBN 0-415-12811-0, Many of the Irish dislike the 'British' in 'British Isles', while the Welsh and Scottish are not keen on 'Great Britain'. ... In response to these difficulties, 'Britain and Ireland' is becoming preferred usage although there is a growing trend amounts some critics to refer to Britain and Ireland as 'the archipelago'.
  9. ^ "Guardian Style Guide". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2 June 2014. British Isles: A geographical term taken to mean Great Britain, Ireland and some or all of the adjacent islands such as Orkney, Shetland and the Isle of Man. The phrase is best avoided, given its (understandable) unpopularity in the Irish Republic. Alternatives adopted by some publications are British and Irish Isles or simply Britain and Ireland
  10. ^ "...(which) I have called the Atlantic archipelago – since the term 'British Isles' is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously." Pocock, J. G. A. (2006). The Discovery of Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 29. ISBN 978-0-521-85095-7.
  11. ^ D. A. Coleman (1982), Demography of immigrants and minority groups in the United Kingdom: proceedings of the eighteenth annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1981, vol. 1981, Academic Press, p. 213, ISBN 0-12-179780-5, The geographical term British Isles is not generally acceptable in Ireland, the term these islands being widely used instead. I prefer the Anglo-Celtic Isles, or the North-West European Archipelago.
  12. ^ Irish historical studies: Joint Journal of the Irish Historical Society and the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1990, p. 98, There is much to be said for considering the archipelago as a whole, for a history of the British or Anglo-Celtic isles or 'these islands'.
  13. ^ John Oakland, 2003, British Civilization: A Student's Dictionary, Routledge: London

    British-Irish Isles, the (geography) see BRITISH ISLES

    British Isles, the (geography) A geographical (not political or CONSTITUTIONAL) term for ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, WALES, and IRELAND (including the REPUBLIC OF IRELAND), together with all offshore islands. A more accurate (and politically acceptable) term today is the British-Irish Isles.
  14. ^ Ahern, Bertie (29 October 1998). "Address at 'The Lothian European Lecture' – Edinburgh". Department of the Taoiseach, Taoiseach's Speeches Archive 1998. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 28 July 2006. [The Island of] Iona is a powerful symbol of relationships between these islands, with its ethos of service not dominion. Iona also radiated out towards the Europe of the Dark Ages, not to mention Pagan England at Lindisfarne. The British-Irish Council is the expression of a relationship that at the origin of the Anglo-Irish process in 1981 was sometimes given the name Iona, islands of the North Atlantic, and sometimes Council of the Isles, with its evocation of the Lords of the Isles of the 14th and 15th centuries who spanned the North Channel. In the 17th century, Highland warriors and persecuted Presbyterian Ministers criss-crossed the North Channel.
  15. ^ World and its Peoples: Ireland and United Kingdom, London: Marshall Cavendish, 2010, p. 8, The nomenclature of Great Britain and Ireland and the status of the different parts of the archipelago are often confused by people in other parts of the world. The name British Isles is commonly used by geographers for the archipelago; in the Republic of Ireland, however, this name is considered to be exclusionary. In the Republic of Ireland, the name British-Irish Isles is occasionally used. However, the term British-Irish Isles is not recognized by international geographers. In all documents jointly drawn up by the British and Irish governments, the archipelago is simply referred to as "these islands." The name British Isles remains the only generally accepted terms for the archipelago off the northwestern coast of mainland Europe.
  16. ^ Marsh, David (11 May 2010). "Snooker and the geography of the British Isles". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 13 May 2010.
  17. ^ Oxford English Dictionary: "British Isles: a geographical term for the islands comprising Great Britain and Ireland with all their offshore islands including the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands."
  18. ^ Alan Lew; Colin Hall; Dallen Timothy (2008). World Geography of Travel and Tourism: A Regional Approach. Oxford: Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-7506-7978-7. The British Isles comprise more than 6,000 islands off the northwest coast of continental Europe, including the countries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. The group also includes the United Kingdom crown dependencies of the Isle of Man, and by tradition, the Channel Islands (the Bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey), even though these islands are strictly speaking an archipelago immediately off the coast of Normandy (France) rather than part of the British Isles.
  19. ^ Ken MacMillan, 2001, "Discourse on history, geography, and law: John Dee and the limits of the British empire", in Canadian Journal of History, April 2001.
  20. ^ R. J. Mayhew, 2000, "Geography is Twinned with Divinity: The Laudian Geography of Peter Heylyn" in Geographical Review, Vol. 90, No. 1 (January 2000), pp. 18–34: "In the period between 1600 and 1800, politics meant what we might now term 'high politics', excluding the cultural and social elements that modern analyses of ideology seek to uncover. Politics referred to discussions of dynastic legitimacy, of representation, and of the Constitution. ... Geography books spanning the period from the Reformation to the Reform Act ... demonstrated their authors' specific political identities by the languages and arguments they deployed. This cannot be seen as any deviation from the classical geographical tradition, or as a tainting of geography by politics, because geography was not to be conceived separately from politics."
  21. ^ Robert Mayhew, 2005, "Mayhew, Robert (March 2005). "Mapping science's imagined community: geography as a Republic of Letters". The British Journal for the History of Science. 38 (1): 73–92. doi:10.1017/S0007087404006478. S2CID 145452323." in the British Journal of the History of Science, 38(1): 73–92, March 2005.