Anglicanism and the British Empire c.1700–1850 by Rowan Strong (review)

91 terbury himself was arrested in August 1722. The remaining chapters of the book describe the bishop’s determined defense against his accusers, and Walpole ’s equally tenacious campaign to insure Atterbury’s disgrace. Ms. Cruickshanks and Mr. Erskine-Hill convincingly demonstrate that Walpole used forged evidence against Atterbury and played fast and loose with the law. They cannot, however, dispute that Atterbury was in fact guilty of the charges against him—and the course Walpole pursued, a bill of pains and penalties, imposed punishments less draconian than those prescribed for traitors. Atterbury did, as the authors show, conduct a brilliant defense —though rooted in perjury. In the end, however, his fate was a foregone conclusion: the bill passed, and Atterbury was forced into exile. After a brief and frustrating career in James III’s service , a disillusioned Atterbury retired. He died in Paris in 1732. Ms. Cruickshanks and Mr. ErskineHill argue forcefully that the Atterbury Plot demonstrated the ‘‘precariousness of George I’s government, especially in the early 1720s.’’ Perhaps true, but its failure undermined the Pretender’s cause as well as the fortunes of the Tory party in Britain. Parliamentary Tories defended Atterbury against Walpole’s charges, thus unwittingly allowing the ministry to present them to the country as Jacobites, and in the 1722 elections the party suffered at the polls. The prosecutions broke up Jacobite networks and discouraged those that remained. By 1723, when Bishop Atterbury sailed into exile, George I’s regime was notably less precarious. Well-researched and passionately argued , their valuable account stands as a corrective to those prone to dismiss Jacobitism to notes. Victor Stater Louisiana State University ROWAN STRONG. Anglicanism and the British Empire c.1700–1850. Oxford: Oxford, 2007. Pp. ix ⫹ 323. $110. A new text detailing the role of the Anglican Church in the establishment of the British Empire seems unnecessary. It seems to be a given that England—like imperialist nations before and contemporaneous to her—justified domination through the belief that God authorized the enterprise. However, the details of the arrangement in the contentious religious landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain are rarely clarified. Mr. Strong presents a thoroughly historicized argument that much scholarship, focusing on Dissenting and Evangelical missionary efforts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, misses the early eighteenthcentury origins of a discourse specifically linking an Anglican missionary agenda to the maintenance of Christianity in colonists and the conversion of natives in the New World. This compact volume notes the early establishment of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1698 and pays particular attention to the impact of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), established by royal charter in 1701 as a missionary society with a mandate Mr. Strong contends that many scholars minimize: actively to participate in ‘‘the first Anglican construction’’ of British imperialism rather than to act merely as its ‘‘largely uncritical supporter.’’ This review concerns the portions of 92 the book devoted to Anglican missionary discourse in the eighteenth century, so the effects of the SPG in North America are of interest, as Anglican missionary involvement in India, New Zealand, and Australia only becomes significant in the nineteenth century. In the early eighteenth century in North America, the missionary’s task of evangelizing among the native populations while maintaining Christianity (and British identity) among the colonists fostered a distaste for both groups. The English colonists themselves, many of them convicts, were seen as degenerates who risked ‘‘a reversal of previous civilization ’’ without missionary presence; their orthodoxy was also threatened by increasingly popular Protestant Dissenters and the ‘‘religious perversion’’ of Roman Catholicism. If it was ‘‘specifically the Christianity of the Church of England, with its retention of the most pure and best reformed faith,’’ that God had chosen to authorize empire, maintaining Anglican purity among English colonists provided a challenge even before missionaries began working among non-Christians. Europeans and nonEuropeans alike presented missionaries with a barbarism that challenged the philosophical assumptions of the early societies’ more liberal members. Probably the most interesting aspect of Mr. Strong’s work is his precise examination of the intersection between Anglican theology, Enlightenment philosophy , and the...