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When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
from the church to the commune occurred. Brodman, Racine, and Mambretti, have recently suggested the ecclesiastical powers remained in control throughout the period. 65 In fact, while the institutional church was resistant to ceding its power, there is abundant evidence of the civic authorities exerting authority over charitable institutions in the fourteenth century while by 1450 they were appropriating all control over the hospitals and seeking to consolidate them into larger civic institutions. Evidence from the first half of the fifteenth century suggests an
Chapter one, which examines the recruitment of the foot-soldiers of the institutional Church, draws attention to the sheer variety of clergy who peopled the Church in the British world in the pre-1860 period. The chapter highlights common dynamics in the development of the colonial clerical profession in the three chosen case studies. We will see that the aims of churchmen from across the Church party spectrum were frustrated by a persistent set of recruitment problems back in Britain—the major problem being that was no centralised or coordinated system for recruiting clergy. The first part of the chapter surveys the range of government organisations, voluntary groups and private individuals that played a part in recruitment; the second half provides a detailed examination of the clergy themselves. A number of questions about the recruitment, training, education and social and ethnic backgrounds of the clergy are considered. The recruitment of clergy shows that power was far from being centralised in the colonial Church: this was an institution that was made up a variety of networks and connections; it was also one that allowed a range of actors to have a hand in finding the men who would staff and run the colonial Church.
broaden our understanding of how the institutional Church was transformed from a privileged establishment into what was ostensibly a great voluntary association. 12 While there is a growing literature on how the Church and individual clergymen negotiated this dramatic shift, 13 some of the implications of the change of status have not been fully examined. Here we will see how the
general criticism of ecclesiastical institutions' inability or unwillingness to meet the charitable demands of these communities. While the universal desire for legitimization of hospital foundations by ecclesiastical authority indicates the still active perception of the all-powerful institutional church, the specifications for lay control by founders indicates the suspicion and declining respect for this institution's actual ability to provide these social services. Still, once hospitals were founded and approved they tended to follow a method of administration that
era of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund. Anderson’s history was founded on the assumption that there was such a thing as a unified ‘colonial Church’. 1 The establishment of a coherent and unified institutional church was an enduring preoccupation of Anglican clergymen in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four showed that efforts to tie the disparate colonial Anglican establishments together
by any attempt of the church to veto this. We will here be appealing directly to the people … There may be scope here for using the Peace People.’26 This was part of a bigger and grander strategy of the government in relation to the church and the Catholic community. Not only did the government decide it needed to enlist the hierarchy’s good offices in its propaganda war against the IRA, but it also saw the need to reduce the institutional church’s hold over the Catholic community for altogether other reasons. As one Northern Ireland Office official put it: The
of the Irish War of Independence. If church historians’ main concern in the past was the functioning of the institutional church and the official formulation of its theology, nowadays it is ‘the place of religion within the community, … facets of daily Christian life and the impact of social and cultural factors upon pious practice’.14 Examining the attempts of priests to shape social and political behaviour can contribute to this approach. And in a comparable development, the attention of historians of the War 11 Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to
medieval community, this was the monastery's role and responsibility. The paternalistic power of ecclesiastical authority over the care of the community cemented the larger institutional church's moral supremacy and authority, and ensured its own continual protection in the form of economic sustenance and political influence. 7 The ecclesiastical response to need in the early Middle Ages took the form of small, rural monastic facilities that functioned as nascent hospitals scattered throughout Europe. There is evidence, although scarce, of
thoroughness with institutional, political and social history. Studies of Huntingdon, Godmanchester and St Neots all appeared 1820–31. the parish and the town—65 Robert Carruthers’s History of Huntingdon (1824) covered institutions, churches, historical events, and the usual material on eminent people, MPs and mayors. James Thompson’s History of Leicester from the Time of the Romans to the End of the Seventeenth Century (1849) is regarded as the best of several histories of the town because it was based on extensive documentary research.41 William Hutton’s History of Derby