War,Imperial Expansion and Religious Developments in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Abstract

This article offers a fresh look at the relationship between war, imperial expansion (itself a consequence of war) and religious developments in Britain and Ireland in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. While conflict between Britain and the Catholic Bourbon powers between 1739 and 1763 heightened popular hostility to ‘popery’ among Protestants, war and the expansion of empire helped to change elite attitudes towards Catholicism. Catholic rehabilitation, though long-drawn-out and limited in this period, had the effect of dividing Protestants, deepening the mutual suspicions and mistrust between Protestant Dissenters and the Anglican establishment in England, Wales and Ireland. *I am grateful to the owners and custodians of the archives that I cite, or from which I quote, for permission to use the material in their collections. This article is an off-shoot of a wider project on the impact of the mid-eighteenth-century wars on Britain and Ireland.