Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic

Abstract

The subject of religion has inspired a successful interdisciplinary inquiry in this volume of essays by literary scholars and historians. The authors’ international approach, with U.S.- and Canada-based scholars working in English-, French-, German-, and Spanish-language materials from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, is a testament to the possibilities and limitations of Atlantic world studies. To organize the history of religion and empire in the prerevolutionary Atlantic world, the editors chose three major themes into which they grouped the essays: “Launching Imperial Projects,” “Colonial Accommodations,” and “Violent Encounters.” A learned critique by Paul Stevens from the University of Toronto provides both a coda and a stronger justification for the book than does the introduction. Taking on David Armitage’s argument from his Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000) that Protestantism has little to say about empire, Stevens makes a compelling case that on the contrary, it was the Christian doctrine of grace that gave the largely Protestant British imperialists such “enormous confidence … in their expansive enterprises” from the time of Edmund Spencer in the late sixteenth century through that of Winston Churchill, with Northern Ireland’s Ian Paisley (a former first minister of Northern Ireland and longtime member of parliament [1970–2010]) a persistent reminder of the way things had been (p. 245). Indeed, “there is hardly a point when English colonial possession and sovereignty in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is not legitimized by an appeal to some version of the Gospel’s argument of grace” (p. 247).