Chapter 2 demonstrates that the Principality played a key role in the invention of novel understandings of the history of the British Empire. While historians like David Hume linked modern Wales with pre-Roman Britain in order to confer upon modern Britain a dubious anti-colonial pedigree, and to equate Britishness with a love of liberty, they also figured the English conquest of Wales as a necessary precondition for the establishment of British imperial power. Seizing upon this hypocrisy, antiquaries like Henry Rowlands insisted that the English were foreign interlopers who had nearly destroyed native British culture. Midcentury writers like Thomas Gray and Edmund Burke sought to suture this rift by contending that ancient Britain, and its modern descendant Wales, were crucial political and aesthetic resources for Britain’s imperial future, but some Jacobins, like Iolo Morganwg, instead portrayed Wales as an insurgent anti-imperial power waiting to unmake the British Empire from within.