Protestant Empire

Carla Gardina Pestana. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Pestina's book is an interesting take on Atlantic history, one which--as the title indicates--focuses on religion. Her research and range is impressive, and for Americanists it is very instructive to see events such as First and Second Great Awakenings placed in a larger, Atlantic context. More broadly, she traces how the religious pluralism that the United States boasted from its inception was not only a product of trans-Atlantic transportation and New World experimentation--a common trope of American history--but also was part of a larger, dynamic process of "circulation", "transplantation", and "negotiation" throughout the growing British Atlantic world. British efforts to mimic Spanish success in using the national church as a tool for colony building and enforcing national unity largely failed, although in the end this failure led to a relatively more ecumenical pan-Protestant British nationalism. This would have important consequences throughout the British Atlantic as well as in the mother country. In the United States, it facilitated the rise of a degree of religious heterogeneity that virtually dictated the creation of the American concept of "separation of church and state", simply because the leaders of the Revolution and then the new republic recognized that there was no way to enforce conformity across such a diverse spectrum of denominations.

Pestana does a very deft job of balancing the various theaters across two full centuries. She explains how the religious and denominational situation was different in England (and Wales, which largely followed the English lead with some exceptions), Scotland, and Ireland. The attempts of the Anglican Church to impose its will throughout England was never completely successful, which partly explains the failure of English authorities to put sufficient effort and resources into their plans to use the church as an institution of state control throughout their colonial possessions. In Scotland, the strength and independence of the Presbyterian kirk not only affected Scottish history, but also provided a base from which that denomination was able to exert influence throughout the empire. And in Ireland, the persistence of Catholicism among the majority was one factor feeding the anti-Catholicism of English nationalism; ultimately, though, this persistence would also support the eventual relaxation of suppression of the church in the UK.

Chapter One, “Religion before English Expansion”, is a look at the religious worlds of the three main regions of what would become the British Atlantic World circa 1500—eastern North America, western Europe, and West Africa. This is not an exercise in comparative history, however, but instead a look at three distinct religious worlds which will be drawn into contact and conflict during the following three centuries. She outlines some differences between the three different religious norms, perhaps most notably the Western Christian beliefs regarding conversion (17). According to Pestana, European Christians tended to regard conversion as a convulsive and decisive decision, rather than a conditional or gradual process. This conceptualization would prove problematic when Euro-American colonists were later faced with native “converts” who approached the decision to embrace Christianity on their own terms—conditionally, and often in negotiation with traditional Native beliefs.

Along with the differences, Pestana also emphasizes underlying similarities—which were generally ignored by most Europeans at the time but which allowed for a more complex process of acculturation and adaptation by American Indians and transplanted African slaves. Despite outward differences between European Christianity, West African traditional religions, and American Indian animism, was a common belief in “densely occupied spiritual landscape”. (18) The three worlds had different rituals and different seasonal calendars, but they all had them. There were several other shared general traits as well. While the differences would largely prove relevant because English colonists would rely on them to justify unilaterally establishing dominance and pushing for “spiritual hegemony”, the similarities would prove important because they explained how Indians and Africans negotiated the belief system of the dominant Euro-American culture often by finding parallels and commonalities which were compatible with their own belief systems.

These three worlds would soon come into intimate contact, but the first convulsion to this order occurred within Western Europe—the Reformation. The rise of Protestantism forced a cleavage in the formally unified Western Christian world. The divisions were often along national lines, as with the establishment of the Church of England. In other places, the division shook the unity of nascent nation-states, driving rulers to at least attempt to impose homogeneity. Religion became tied to nationality and state-building in the wake of the Reformation. In the British world, this tendency was complicated by a number of factors, including the failure of Anglicanism to completely dominate England; the rise of Presbyterianism as the main religion in Scotland; the persistence of a Catholic minority in Great Britain; and the attempt to conquer, subdue, and incorporate Catholic Ireland into the polity.

Rather than resolves these tensions, the English crown ended up exporting them, as different faiths and religious institutions were able to establish themselves in different colonies. And in turn, these colonial settlements provided “laboratories” in which religious institutions could experiment and develop—and then transmit newly strengthened religious identities back to the home country. The colonies also provided a base for Protestant sects such as the Puritans and the Quakers to develop their own orthodoxies and institutions. These would play a role in politics back in England.

In the end, the British polity would create a new pan-Atlantic ‘Britishness’ based on a broad commitment to Protestantism, rather than a narrower conception of Anglicanism as the basis of citizenship and patriotism. The British turned the heterogeneous nature of British religious life into an asset, as they united disparate denominations into a relatively unified anti-Catholicism.

Pestana has created a fresh vantage point from which to view American religious history as well as Atlantic history. My only complaint with this book is a minor one. She has a tendency to overly elaborate at times--some points are repeated for no apparent reason. And frequently she will repeat an explanation in one chapter of a point that was already elaborated in a previous chapter. The latter might very well be a result of a long process of writing and development. The former, however, sometimes seems a matter of occasional clumsiness. This, however, is a very minor problem, and Petana might very well counter that she would rather make her point too well than not well enough.

The Web of Empire

Alison Games. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolians in an Age of Expansion 1560-1660. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008

Games has written a provocative history of the English traders, ministers, ambassadors, adventurers, merchants, and colonists of a period spanning the rise of the English state as a rival--at first an underdog, but then increasingly a formidable foe--to the other centralized European trading and colonizing powers during the century indicated in the title. In doing so, she has implicitly taken American colonial history beyond Atlantic history into a more global arena. She also refutes the conventional wisdom regarding the centrality of the Irish experience to the colonial enterprise in North America. This study forces Americanists to reconsider the early colonial experience within a broader framework than most histories have conceptualized.

Her argument covers a lot of ground both spatially and temporally, but the central theme is this--during the rise of English expansionism, the English state was weak relative to other Western European powers, meaning that the English lacked the robust military and naval resources to confront imperial rivals directly or to impose their wishes on various foreign peoples and entities. The English were late to the game in establishing trading connections in the Mediterranean, in Africa, the Indian Ocean, East Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Time and time again, the English found themselves operating from a position of weakness--forced to rely on the expertise of other Europeans, and to accommodate to local conditions and mores to a degree which was quite troubling at a time when concerns over English sovereignty and threats to Protestant sanctity made the very act of travelling suspect. Let alone a willingness to engage foreigners and non-Protestants on their own terms. The cosmopolitanism of these Englishmen was hard-won and fraught with dangers both foreign and domestic.

This era ends with the rise of a more centralized state which was far more willing and able to expend resources on the tools of imposing its will on other peoples as well as its own subjects--particularly a larger standing army and a state-controlled navy. This process was started by Cromwell, and ironically continued by Charles II. The reliance on private militias and armed merchant ships would be a thing of the past, as would (eventually) the cosmopolitanism of the time. The English would eventually come to rely on coercion and force to impose their will as the growing power of their state allowed them to develop new tools of empire.

However, the transition did not happen immediately, meaning that the British North American colonies were largely founded by men working in the early dynamic that Games articulates. The fact that the later, more centralized mode of British imperialism post-dated the establishment of the thirteen mainland colonies surely influenced the American colonists expectations over their relationship to the mother country. That is another story, but while Games does not look ahead to the eventual break, the implication is there in the final pages. While this book is immediately a study of an important stage in the growth of the British state and its global role, American historians will benefit from this opportunity to see the British founding of the colonies in a new context. 

The Birth of America

William R. Polk. The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.

Polk--a descendant of the American president with the same surname--has spent most of his long career as a diplomat and political scholar, but with this book he chose to, as he states in the introduction, offer a "different angle of vision" on the history of the colonial era of American history. The introduction presents a brief synopsis of American historiography, reinforcing his point that the story of America's founding still needs to be revisited and retold in the light of new sources, new points of view, and new interpretations. So, as a non-American historian but an experienced scholar, he offers his own version.

How does he do? To begin with, credit must be given--he has done his research. For a non-specialist, he has an impressive command of a wide range of sources. Polk is writing for a general audience, and his writing style is well-suited to finding a broader audience than many academics. He has a good eye for telling anecdotes and examples, and he utilizes them frequently to bring this far-reaching narrative to life. 

The story he tells is hardly comprehensive--Polk is very good at giving the Indian story its due, and he places slavery at the very center of the colonial saga, but he has little if anything to say about gender or family, nor does he trouble himself too much with culture or intellectual history. But these are observations, not criticisms. This is a "big picture" story which is deeply rooted in an Atlantic history perspective. Part I, "Europe and Africa Come to America" takes up the first 100 pages of a 309-page text, so that the book devotes fully a third of its length to the various actors who would collide, collude, and intermingle in what became British North America.

Even a specialist night enjoy his take. His eye for detail, noted above, keeps the story fresh even when the general outline is already known. True to his explanation at the very beginning that history is not fixed and is always affected by what is important in the present, some of the details he chooses to highlight are very pointed rejoinders to contemporary (mis-)readings. His assertion that most colonial Americans neither owned guns nor knew how to use them would be quite a surprise in many circles where references to the Founders are routine.

All in all, this is a lively and well-crafted book; Polk fulfills his promise to the reader to take a "fresh look" at a story all too many Americans think they know better than they actually do.