The Making of Popish Bishops in Britain's Ceded Empire, 1710s–1820s

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.