Anti-Papal Geopolitics: David Armitage and the Religious Origins of the British Empire

This article responds to the third chapter of David Armitage's The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, in which Armitage contends that there was no straightforwardly Protestant justification for the early British Empire. On Armitage's telling, Protestantism acted, if anything, as a constraint on efforts to legitimise British imperial rule, posing intellectual problems – especially the sharp disjuncture between grace and dominium – that were not easily solved. Revisiting these claims after a quarter of a century, this article brings Armitage's Ideological Origins into conversation with recent research on early British colonial activity beyond the Atlantic. It suggests that an insistence on the separation of grace and dominium could – in certain settings – benefit, rather than constrain, British colonial ambition, and offers some broader reflections on the power of anti-popery as an act of geopolitical positioning.