English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime by J. C. D. Clark (review)

91 In his very thorough survey of the historiography of Empire, Mr. Armitage notes to good effect the influence of very fluid notions of English history and its relation to a developing concept of ‘‘empire .’’In the next chapter, concerned with the language of governance in the ‘‘three Kingdoms,’’ not surprisingly, talk of imperium and the jurisdiction of a composite monarchy over a number of lands and peoples was the spur to finding a concept that reconciled the parts to the whole. As is often the case in early modern political thought, the development of a particular concept is driven by conflict. Mr. Armitage skillfully reconstructs debates about Protestantism and Empire, Grotius and the Empire of the seas, the political economy of Empire, and finally the culmination of all of this in the age of Walpole , when the Empire was defined as ‘‘Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.’’ The story that unfolds is one of a parallel process of the building of an Empire and the building of the British state; here, Mr. Armitage helpfully distinguishes the ‘‘first’’and ‘‘second’’Britishempires:the first sustained by ships and trade, the second by soldiers and institutions of political control. The Empire whose origins are traced here had its nadir in 1776, and so the account is easily squared with the imperial crisis on the English-speaking Atlantic that is described by Jack Greene and John Pocock. Moreover, further parallels with existing scholarship can be found in the political ‘‘languages’’ that Mr. Armitage seeks to privilege: we hear of Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, as well as figures in the Scottish Enlightenment (Francis Hutcheson, Andrew Fletcher, David Hume). The paradox: in a study which depicts a long process of disagreement over the origins and nature of the Empire, the principal speakers are united in their use of secular neoRoman and neo-Machiavellianlanguages which are the hallmark of the Cambridge school. What of religion? Disputes between Englishconformistsandunrulyadherents to the Scottish Kirk, or even dissenters of an Irish or colonial stamp would furnish additional insights into the problems of governing far-flung lands and peoples. And what of the threat of ‘‘popery’’— sufficient in and ofitselftogenerateavast anti-Spanish and anti-French literature filledwithreferencesto‘‘GreatBritain’s’’ providential destiny? Mr. Armitage’s treatment of religion will strike some as unsatisfactory. Eighteenth-century antiCatholicism , heargues,‘‘wasmostlynegative in content, and hence could hardly be a source of positive arguments’’ in favor of Empire. Elsewhere he notes that while Protestantism furnished writers with a ‘‘common chronology and a history ,’’by the middleoftheeighteenthcentury its meaning had been secularizedand confined to ‘‘rights of possession.’’ Others have celebrated this book’s achievement , but is it either helpful or honest to portray the thought of the early modern period as being driven by ‘‘classical’’categories to the exclusion of religion? Charles W. A. Prior Queen’s University at Kingston J. C. D. CLARK. English Society, 1660– 1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2000. Pp. xii ⫹ 580. $85; $29.95 (paper). This is a substantially expanded version of English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), which boldly proclaimed a new era in the historiography of the long eighteenth century. Yet, this new edition 92 represents less a revision of its predecessor than a reinforcement of Mr. Clark’s most contentious claims; more evidencemaybeonoffer,butthequestion remains: is this portrait of ‘‘English society ’’ either coherent or complete? Both this work and his Language of Liberty (1994) seek to trace the origins and nature of the ‘‘Protestant constitution ,’’a concept used to describe theways in which politics and religion intermingled . With the aid of scholarship published since 1985, Mr. Clark builds upon the notion that England was a ‘‘confessional state’’ whereby political choices and positionswereinfluencedbytensions between the orthodox Church of England , and a wide range of denominations that criticized its rites and organizational structure.Emphasisisthereforeplacedon the continuity of these debates, from the moment Church and Crown were restored to the nineteenth century, whenthe Reform Bills dismantled the Protestant constitution. In all, Mr. Clark argues, the long eighteenth century was not defined by incipient liberalism, secularism, and industrialization; instead, its conflicts were atavistic, religious, and very much confined by a worldview that had itsroots in the seventeenth century. The...