The Making of Popish Bishops in Britain's Ceded Empire, 1710s–1820s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The eighteenth‐century British Empire, on the rise and expanding vis‐à‐vis rivals Spain and France, faced many challenges of colonial governance. Primary among them was the incorporation of Catholic “new subjects” and the institutions of their church into an officially Anglican imperial polity. While the former have been the subject of sophisticated analysis by scholars of imperial reform, subjecthood, and the law and of specific colonies such as Quebec, the latter — “ecclesiastical affairs” — has not been sufficiently factored into the study of British colonial practice writ large. This article focuses on one institution, the Catholic episcopacy, and examines it across the “Ceded Empire” that Britain gained as a result of treaties concluded with the Catholic powers in 1713, 1763, and 1802/14. I explore the bishop problem, essentially, how to transform the Catholic hierarchy from a presumed enemy into a reliable ally of the Protestant imperial State. The problem originated in the first‐round cessions but was not resolved until after 1815, when the British State struck a deliberate and public, if still informal, alliance with the Catholic hierarchy. That it took a century to implement the solution indicates both the pervasiveness and durability of political anti‐Catholicism and its significant impact on British strategies of colonial rule, even as threats deemed more existential than the Catholic hierarchy emerged during the Age of Revolutions. It further suggests the need to broaden the typology of anti‐Catholicism to include a specifically eighteenth‐century variation: imperio‐political anti‐Catholicism. Originating in the contests between the British Empire and its Catholic rivals, it is defined by its imperial contours, its preoccupation with colonial security, and its pragmatic re‐assessment of the danger Catholic subjects and institutions, including bishops and the papacy itself, were traditionally seen to pose.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".