A Catholic Atlantic?

The ties that bound the Atlantic colonies of north-eastern British North America with Ireland, Scotland and the islands of the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were intricate and extensive. They connected a range of people and professions, cut across boundaries meant to separate the citizens of the French, Spanish and British empires, and supported an ever-expanding collection of economic, kinship and social networks. Catholics navigated this world with impressive dexterity. They came from a range of backgrounds and their presence across every colony and territory enabled their church, perhaps the most influential pan-European institution, to play a pivotal role in colonial formation. One of the biggest hurdles for a holistic exploration of a Catholic Atlantic within the British World is developing a methodology that enables us to deal with the reality of a Catholic population that was ethnically diverse and comprised of disparate groups including white Europeans, enslaved people, free people of colour, and Indigenous people. The rich perspectives emerging from the ‘spatial turn’ can enable us to do so.1 The literature on Catholics and empire is at something of a crossroads. Gabriel Glickman has noted the marked tendency to think solely in terms of a Franco-Iberian Catholic Atlantic in historical scholarship on the early modern period to the exclusion of Britain and Ireland.2 There is a mixed, but voluminous, literature on Catholic missions to Asia and Africa in the modern period, but the Catholic role in settler colonial society remains understudied. Similarly, there has been an increasing tendency to consider the secular church as acting in an imperialist mode, particularly in the case of the Irish and English, but studies consistently omit consideration of the Catholic laity.3 This is most obvious when taking a transnational or Atlantic view, though some new work is offering alternative perspectives.4 Similarly, few publications consider the agency of migrant, free people of colour, and enslaved Catholics.5 What is needed is a repositioning of the research to prioritize the laity to help us paint a more complete picture of the extent to which British imperial ambitions were augmented or subverted by liminal Catholic actors that were able to move through space differently to those of other faiths. This oceanic sphere was replete with pathways through time and space. Our research is focused on exploring the idea of a ‘Catholic Atlantic’ as existing within a British imperial framework because while we know that Catholics occupied significant space in what was a very large and broad geography, we do not yet know how they understood ‘their’ Atlantic world. Britain’s imperial project was a collaboration of myriad groups: for the planters and merchant traders, it was an economic one; for a good many Scots, it was a Scottish one; for missionaries, it was a Christian one. One reason for this was the Catholics of Ireland and another was the fact that after the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Britain acquired a number of colonies and territories with very large minority or majority Catholic populations in north-eastern British North America and the Caribbean. Thus, in addition to Ireland’s Catholics and those scattered across Scotland, England and, to a lesser extent, Wales, the number of Catholics under Britain’s jurisdiction grew exponentially over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within these newly acquired colonies and territories, the Catholic populations were inherently diverse and included new groups such as the Acadians and Indigenous Catholics in the north and enslaved and free people of colour in the south. Acknowledging their presence alongside growing numbers of Irish and Scottish Highland Catholics in particular and how they lived at local colonial levels can teach us much about the agency of imperial constituencies. The islands of the Caribbean, like Quebec, Cape Breton, and even Prince Edward Island, provided physical and administrative spaces that enabled a high degree of Catholic autonomy in ways that influenced the evolution of colonial identities. The work of Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Hannah Weiss-Muller and S. Karly Kehoe has started to unpack this, but understanding how Catholics influenced colonial development and imperial policy requires much more work.6 Ties of trade, political union through the commonwealth, tourism, and fisheries certainly bound together a British Atlantic world but what of the religious dimension?7 This gap in the research raises a couple of questions for us: did the integration of Catholic actors in the Caribbean cement British dominance in a way that was similar to that of north-eastern British North America? And, if so, did it further the aims of the Protestant state to have a sub-strata of Catholic administrators, religious leaders, and laypersons circulating in these regions? The presence of Irish, Scottish, or Canadian Catholics in the Caribbean poses significant issues for our understanding of the field of Atlantic Studies as well as that of the British World. The spatial turn has been much debated within Atlantic studies with scholars arguing for both a hemispherical approach as well as a continental approach that considers the American interior.8 Both would, theoretically, help to counteract an acknowledged over-emphasis on the relationship between Colonial America and Britain, as well as what has become known as the ‘Revolutionary Atlantic’. This fascination with the French and American revolutions has ‘concentrated Atlantic questions upon the political and diplomatic history’ of both nations as well as what Allan Potofsky calls a sort of métropole-centrism from both French and Anglosphere historians of the eighteenth century.9 Likewise the study of Catholics and empire in the same period suffers from a metropole centrism as well as a methodological nationalism that militates against considering Catholics in circulation. In both cases, as David Armitage has put it, the study of empires focused on the extension of national modes of history, giving rise to such terms as the ‘Irish Spiritual Empire’ or ‘Scotland’s Empire’ – both terms indicating a national possession that never existed in the first place.10 It also indicates an exclusion of minority identities within broader fields such as the Atlantic and the British World, a probable by-product of the relationship between space and power or control. ‘Any struggle to reconstitute power relations’, as Harvey puts it, ‘is a struggle to reorganize their spatial bases’.11 Catholics are rarely seen as ‘powerful’ within either of these larger fields. A Catholic Atlantic allows us to consider these issues in overlap. Historians of the British Empire are moving away from core-periphery models of enquiry to understand more about how spaces like the ones we are exploring were self-defining through a range of direct interactions that did not require or want intervention from London.12 Unlike the studies that have tended to concentrate on trade, migration, consumption patterns, and political history, we are curious about minority agency. Specifically, we are interrogating the existence of a Catholic Atlantic that existed within the British imperial sphere to establish a more granular understanding of the importance of religious segmentation in colonies that had large non-Protestant populations. We want to understand how Catholicity informed governance, faith worship, trade connections, and everyday living between 1763 and 1860 – a period that witnessed major change for both the British Empire and the Catholic Church in Britain’s colonies. The end of the Seven Years War brought the north-eastern Atlantic as well as valuable islands in the Caribbean under British control. Relations between Spanish, French and British and Irish Catholics shifted in the late eighteenth century as British hegemony intensified. This was felt most acutely in Trinidad where between 1776 and 1783 the Spanish had incentivized Catholic planters to migrate from Grenada in large numbers. The population exploded from around 3000 in 1782 to just under 19,000 by 1789 – this six-fold increase in just seven years included 10,000 enslaved people.13 In rapid succession the island changed hands in the 1790s, with the Spanish ceding control of a largely Francophone population to the British and Irish. British control in all of these places had peaked by 1860 and a Catholic diocesan architecture was firmly embedded, and also to some degree Gaelicized. The crucible of the Catholic Atlantic was here in the island archipelago of the Greater Caribbean and so what we are doing with this project is interrogating the ways in which Catholic worlds met at this junction of religion, trade, and peoples. Catholics were the United Kingdom’s largest religious minority after 1801 and over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, significant numbers of Irish and Scottish Highland Catholics spread throughout this region. If Catholic historians have failed to think transnationally, then historians of the British world have elided the Catholic experience by privileging a Protestant one.14 Relegating this influential minority to a footnote or two has had the effect of exonerating Catholic imperialism in spite of the major impact it had on colonial identity formation. Catholics from Britain and Ireland were proactive colonizers – this is indisputable. A database, which is being created from roughly 3500 settler land petitions for Cape Breton Island, reveals numerous instances of Scottish and Irish Catholics requesting and receiving large tracts of land that were known to be in use by the indigenous Mi’kmaq.15 On this land, they built homes and saw mills, grew crops and raised livestock; they also constructed chapels and established cemeteries. They put down the roots of communities that would spread across the region and link with other colonies around the Atlantic world. These Scottish and Irish settlers, like other Europeans, reinforced the distance between colonizer and colonized through a shared faith that was defined by obvious racial and ethnic hierarchies.16 We are at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the various and deeply complex dimensions of settler colonialism, but we can use the experience of Catholics in north-eastern British North America and in the Caribbean to begin to explore this. Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester’s work is instructive here since it engages with this concept in a way that presents ‘a globe networked in new ways through Empire’.17 Likewise the work of Miles Ogborn and Clare Anderson challenges historians to think sensitively about hierarchies of race and faith alongside that of class.18 By focusing on the classic crossroads of competing European empires, our concept of a Catholic Atlantic stretching into the modern era changes the analytical terms so that we can better identify the complexities of what being a ‘peripheral’, and specifically Catholic, colonizer in regions where their populations were large and/or dominant might have meant. For much of the eighteenth century and early-to-mid nineteenth century, the Catholic Caribbean was classified by Propaganda Fide in the series Congressi, sub-series America Antille, and not in the sub-series America Settentrionale.19 This means that although it was viewed as one of the ‘British Provinces’, an important distinction had been made which kept it separate. The Caribbean region was omitted from the first Catholic directory of the Americas in 1822, and Myers of Baltimore omitted it from their almanacs in the 1830s, but thereafter the region was almost always included by the wide variety of commercial directories on the market by Sadleir, Dunigan, Murphy, and Hoffman.20 This provides ample justification for a rethink of the many meanings of the ‘British Provinces’. The Catholic population of the islands was being ministered to by Spanish, French, Irish, and British congregations and orders and often – as if to make matters more complicated – a combination of these. When the French order of the Holy Ghost Fathers of Blackrock in Dublin turned up in Trinidad, were they to be considered French or Irish? The Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny were founded in France in the early nineteenth century – the first convent of their congregation in Trinidad, which began with six women religious, was established in Port of Spain in 1836 from a community in Martinique, a foundation that had itself been made by sisters from communities on the west coast of the African continent in Sierra Leone and the Gambia.21 Given the diversity of their backgrounds and missionary experiences, does it make sense to nationalize their mission? How did they understand their religious world and how did they navigate the various imperial jurisdictions? The same questions might be asked of the majority of religious congregations, female and male, who had a presence in this region. The Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, who established a convent in Jamaica in the mid-1850s, for example, were a mixture of Irish, French, and Scottish backgrounds and had gone there from Glasgow after being established in that city by two nuns from Tourcoing, France.22 The religious life was inherently transnational, but to which nation did they align, and under which circumstances and, in the context of their missions in this Catholic Atlantic space, how much did it matter? The correspondence of John Thomas Hynes offers a brief and tantalizing glimpse at the fluidity of the Catholic Atlantic. En route to Georgetown in 1826, he shared space with Fr Denis O’Callaghan, a controversial secular priest whom he learned to dislike on the 30-day voyage from Cobh in Cork to Barbados on the Ring-Mahon. O’Callaghan spent time on St Vincent and Grenada, where he managed to irritate the British authorities, before eventually dying in Montserrat. Hynes’s focus was on building up a Catholic presence in Demerara, Essequibo, and Guyana.23 From his perch in Guyana, he sent pet parrots and remittances back to his family, including money to cover transatlantic fares for family members willing to join him. He constructed churches, baptized hundreds of ‘adults and negroes’ a year, and made a note of any Catholic educational ventures, missions, or strays that came through ‘his’ region. He memorably described the Irish Catholics of Barbados as the ‘shabbiest set that could be packed together’, and occasionally found work as an overseer on the plantations for any destitute Irishmen that washed up in Demerara.24 Hynes was part of an active Irish laity there, who raised money and petitioned the king, via Lord Bathurst, for permission to build a chapel and worship openly as Catholics.25 The population of this part of the Catholic Atlantic included ‘several thousand whites, seventy-five thousand slaves and many nations of Indians in the Interior’ and in a letter to Rome’s Cardinal Lorenzo Litta, Charles Waterton, the Stonyhurst-educated naturalist, explained that in the colonies of Demerara and Essequibo low morals and lack of education of the Indigenous and enslaved peoples were deeply problematic. In his opinion, ensuring that the Europeans among them had access to proper religious instruction was the priority of the locally established Catholic committee.26 This tripartite function of employment facilitation, infrastructural development, and the conversion of Indigenous and enslaved people is a major aspect of the Catholic Atlantic that remains underexplored. Given that the influence of race and ethnicity was pervasive in both the north-eastern region and in the Caribbean, this is a gap that is deeply problematic. Both groups were consistently peripheralized by governmental and religious authorities, who wanted to keep colonial and church power structures white. Given the extremely large population of enslaved Catholics in the Caribbean prior to 1838, we lack a genuine awareness of how Catholicism functioned there.27 In Trinidad, where the centre of Catholic authority would sit, tensions ran high as Church officials and government administrators confronted Black agency in people like Fr Francis de Ridder, the son of an enslaved mother and Belgian-born planter father. Sent to Europe for his religious training before returning to the Caribbean as an ordained secular priest, de Ridder inspired confidence in the Black population because he pressed for racial equality. His willingness to challenge openly the inherent racism of Catholicism in his Given all of this, how can we to rethink of Catholicism in this region in a way that the Black Catholic One to this and very of how a Catholic Atlantic and imperial social policy can be seen in educational policy across the empire in the The of the for the of or education in a in the the for money to be in the hands of Catholic by Catholic had a A had been a of would the government to money to Catholic congregations and orders via an This the of the British Catholic education while at the same time Catholic with the money they needed to and In the of Ireland this is most often as if it was an Irish to an Irish In it was a to an Irish The policy in Ireland in had been in Trinidad in the early after an Irish Catholic education – – had been sent to the education there by the Irish Catholic for the Lord There had been major with the education as a on the island the of in when the was The colonial to for the education of of of newly Black meant that there was in the had been that the various that were on the would for it, but their for more and their for of the of the at meant that what existed was The rise of what as a and to an educational that for was influential because it to a of education that the of the enslaved people from those of the Black The evolution of education on the island was complex because although it was influenced by a range of what there had to work for the people of the island – a population that was extremely diverse in terms of and of this is seen in Joseph of his to Trinidad in where he found in for use in the Irish something across the British – – noted that while these were the or he would to be something more of the of history, of of trade, of of The for would for an series of would the and of There are many of the Catholic Atlantic at play Irish Catholic sent by an Irish Catholic colonial to changes to a of education to some extent on the Irish one. at the Irish being in Trinidad as but not to the local of the region. complete the the Irish education was in and on the of that in There is also of to that the Holy Ghost Fathers had a role in for the change in Ireland, with a in both Trinidad and two in Ireland and educational such as the and the Holy Ghost Fathers all for the to the Irish the Irish education was on the one was a In a to in Lord on that had been founded upon the of the of the Trinidad it further within the British World, either as a policy in the British Empire with significant Catholic populations in or policy for and how the Catholic Atlantic not created space for Catholic of and it also the British World in These of at the for a Catholic Atlantic to the fields of Catholic Atlantic and the British World, and to the of the Catholics that across boundaries with in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as free people of colour, enslaved people, or If understanding is about the of power and then a Catholic Atlantic Catholic both and more for their in a period of of were by the

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