Empire and Overseas Missions

Abstract

The international context of British and Irish Catholicism extended beyond Europe. By the later seventeenth century, Catholics from England and Ireland were actively involved in the colonial and commercial expansion of the Stuart realm. A growing cohort from Scotland participated after the Act of Union in 1707. Catholics worked within the empire as governors, soldiers, and traders. Missionary clergymen operated on the territorial frontiers, and major enclaves of Catholic settlement were established in Maryland and parts of the West Indies. This chapter shows how the growth of empire influenced the political strategies and ideological development of Catholic communities in Britain and Ireland. The colonial arena created opportunities for power, profit, and public office-holding in places far beyond the dictates of parliamentary penal laws. Service of the expanding realm offered ways for Catholics to advertise loyalist credentials and make a case for extending civil and religious liberties to their co-religionists at home. As these activities registered in colonial politics, however, the Catholic presence created divisions that added to the strains on emergent settlements and echoed back to raise domestic controversies over the management of the overseas dominions. While overseas expansion was justified publicly and rhetorically as a Protestant enterprise, the Catholic contribution spoke to a more conflicted and contentious relationship between the confessional and colonialist interests of the early modern English kingdom.