She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World, and reported the following:Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World may fail the page 99 test. Page 99 falls at the conclusion of a chapter, providing a general discussion to summarize the main point of the preceding chapter and anticipate the next one.Read an excerpt from Protestant Empire, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.
Chapter three considers the first half century of English expansion into the Atlantic world. Within decades of the founding of the first colonies, Scotland, England, and Ireland collapsed into civil wars, rebellions, and eventual regicide. Sharing the same monarch, these three distinct kingdoms all boosted different religious establishments and distinctive religious majorities (Presbyterian, Anglican, and Catholic). Rulers hoped to establish the Church of England in all their Atlantic dominions, believing that political loyalty followed from religious affiliation. Diversity at home and the largely unchecked impulse on the part of non-Anglicans to migrate made that impossible. Soon colonies exhibited even greater diversity than was the case at home. This diversity was further exacerbated—in all kingdoms as well as in the colonies—by the coming of revolution, which gave rise to new sects (most famously the Quakers) and added impetus to the growth of older faith traditions (such as the Baptists). This chapter chronicles the explosion of diversity, the largely unsuccessful efforts to staunch it, and the anomalous case of some New England colonies, which created a strong established church that was not patterned on the monarch’s own Church of England.
Taken in total, Protestant Empire charts the history of Atlantic religious encounters from 1500, when Europe, West Africa, and the Americas were on the verge of interactions that would shape the modern world, to 1830, when the new United States had left the British Empire to chart its own path politically while staying very much within a shared religious culture that connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Ranging widely through the Atlantic basin and across centuries, the book reveals the creation of a complicated, contested, and closely intertwined world of believers of many traditions.
Text on page 99:
{The Atlantic empire Charles II regained in 1660 differed markedly [98]} from the one that his father had ruled over in 1640, and changes that had overtaken it in the interim would not be reversed. This revolutionary interlude had a particularly significant impact on British Atlantic religion by increasing diversity within and beyond the Christian community, politicizing religious positions, and sparking discussion of religious liberty in distant colonies not so quickly influenced by changes at home. By 1660 the newly instated monarch held a far-flung collection of colonies in the Atlantic world, and controlled England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Much of what had been wrought in the decades of revolution since the founding of the first successful English colony would remain as it was. The diversity among and within kingdoms had been transferred into the wider Atlantic world and exacerbated by the increased fragmentation of the revolutionary era. The transplantation of religious institutions to the new plantations had ironically been most successful in the case of New England congregationalism, a system that necessitated the local control that an Atlantic setting encouraged. Hence the first successful religious establishment in the English New World had no direct equivalent as an establishment in England or the other Stuart kingdoms.
Of necessity religious observance in the wider Atlantic was often a personal affair since individuals and families were bereft of institutional supports for their faith. Thrown back on their own resources, believers acted on their adherence to any one of a wide variety of faith traditions at work in the region, including various forms of Christianity as well as Judaism, Islam, and traditional Native American and African faiths. Believers navigated a complex and variegated religious reality that had emerged by 1660, with profound implications for the future of religion in the British Atlantic world.
Carla Gardina Pestana, W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University, is the author or editor of several books, including The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661.
--Marshal Zeringue
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