Evan Haefeli, ed. Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism.

Abstract

Why study anti-Catholicism? The concept has proved useful to a wide array of historians. With the retreat of Marxist theories of history in the 1970s and 1980s, historians of revolution found in anti-Catholicism an explanation for why English people rallied against their kings in the revolutions of 1649 and 1688: it was religious tensions, not class conflicts, that drove these events. Historians investigating the rise of national identity saw anti-Catholicism as a magnet around which concepts of nationhood could coalesce in Protestant lands. Lately, as historians of Europe have shifted their collective gaze to global and imperial history, anti-Catholicism has remained relevant. It has helped, for instance, to explain how British colonists distinguished themselves from their French and Spanish rivals. For all sorts of historians interested in what the Germans call Feindbilder, or images of the enemy, anti-Catholicism has served as a classic example of collective antipathy, similar to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The boom in studies of anti-Catholicism might be traced back to Edward Said’s Orientalism of 1978: to study it is to apprehend how Protestants perceived “the other.”