Carla Gardina Pestana's new survey of religious history from the Reformation into the first half of the nineteenth century identifies changes in spiritual belief and practice, in conjunction with the advance of European overseas interests, as the motor in the creation of new worlds for West Africans, American Indians, and Western Europeans in the English-speaking places around the Atlantic Ocean during the early modern period: “Religious faith—both individual belief and its collective expression—are [sic] key to understanding the history of the British Atlantic World” (260). Pestana's synthesis, relatively unburdened by scholarly apparatus, offers advanced undergraduates and interested general readers, who may lack a wider familiarity with the literature, a helpful survey of both the nature of religion(s) among the peoples who lived in the Americas, Africa, and Europe at this time and the changes that transpired in faith over the course of three centuries. Thus, it affords the further advantages of a demonstration of the permutations of religious history as well as the perspective of that history afforded by a wider lens than the traditional national one. We also receive important instances where links that had developed between Britain and its American colonies survived the War of Independence.
Pestana opens her account with a portrait of the religious situation in the four continents adjacent to the Atlantic at the late fifteenth-century dawn of European activity in the Atlantic that incorporates a review and comparison of the respective worldviews of the peoples brought into increasingly close contact by European exploratory, commercial, and colonizing ventures. In doing so, she stresses that the customary “impulse to sort belief into Christian and pagan, religion versus no religion—although it makes sense when we are primarily interested in theology or ideologies of Christian conquest—ignores the shared ways that belief and practice worked in people's own lives” (17). Fundamentally, faith—whether in African, European, or Indian contexts—provided meaning and gave order to life, through similar, although usually locality-based, sets of deities, narratives, and rituals.
In addition to shattering this relatively common understanding of the relationship between the spiritual and physical worlds that had developed spontaneously and independently around the Atlantic, the Reformation spawned both a competition between Catholics and Protestants to extend their creeds beyond Europe and the ultimate emergence of Britain as the preeminent Protestant state. Paradoxically, as Pestana notes, this latter phenomenon gave rise to unparalleled religious diversity in both the British Isles and the Anglo-American colonies.
The acceptance—often grudging, but sometimes (as in the cases, for instance, of Pennsylvania and South Carolina) welcoming—of alternative belief systems (except, significantly, Roman Catholicism) generated unprecedented demographic diversity in the British Empire as well: Huguenots, Mennonites, and other persecuted groups on the Continent found refuge in British North America; while the stuttering missionary efforts undertaken by the likes of John Eliot, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and Eleazar Wheelock, as well as the generally increased opportunity for introduction to English Protestantism for Africans and Indians afforded by better transport and communication links, ultimately bore fruit in the form of converts such as the Wampanoags on Martha's Vineyard, Olaudah Equiano, and Samson Occom. The involvement of these non-white participants in British Protestantism contributed, in turn, both to the extension of British imperial activity in places like Sierra Leone and to the attempts by the Methodists and Quakers, for instance, to reform British society, especially in terms of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
The lack of central purpose in the development of this Protestantism and the inability of the established Church to impose itself on the consciences of many British Protestants meant this “Protestant Empire,” to Pestana's mind, was one defined by “Protestantism” in an essentially negative sense: Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and others might have had serious doctrinal differences, but they shared a general commitment to anti-popery and the associated need for vigilance against the machinations of imperial rivals Spain and, later, France, as well as, after 1689, Jacobitism. But even so, and despite the rhetoric employed, for instance, by Richard Hakluyt, at what proved to be the genesis of the British Empire, the British imperial mission never assumed crusade status.
Pestana has carefully identified these ambiguities, which, in itself, highlights a further question: Britain, by 1820 (where Protestant Empire ends, approximately), was certainly a Protestant nation, and it certainly had come into possession (and had lost a substantial chunk) of an overseas empire. But to what degree did Protestantism provide a foundation for a shared British identity and to what degree did Protestantism really provide the fuel for British imperial development?
Unquestionably, religious politics dominated Anglo-British history after 1530, as called to mind by the image of the “martyred” Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) that adorned the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer and which, curiously, appears on the cover of Protestant Empire. It can be very difficult, and perhaps ahistorical, to separate “religion” from “politics” here. For Charles's efforts to compel his subjects to adhere to the 1637 prayer book blew up spectacularly. At the same time, he maintained a fitful interest in empire and in undertaking any Protestant cause. Moreover, this portrait appeared in conjunction with the “Clarendon Code” by which the Cavalier Parliament exacted its revenge against those who had assaulted monarchy and episcopacy by mandating, yet again, a state-sponsored orthodoxy. At the same time, the “Protestant Empire” prepared for the second of three bitter wars (not counting the Dutch invasion of England in 1688) between England and its great Protestant rival, the Dutch Republic (none of which receive mention, significantly, in Pestana's treatment), that were fought, in large part, over their competing overseas claims. It is perhaps one thing to have created a “British Atlantic World” (a concept of which contemporaries remained unaware) and another, rather different one, to have created a British Empire.
