In this examination of Irish and Scottish Catholics, Karly Kehoe seeks to show that realities on ‘the unfashionable edges of empire’ (p. 4), provided ‘unprecedented opportunities for Catholics and other minority groups to participate in the process of colonialism and in the construction of the British imperial state’ (p. 7). In the process she challenges the view that Protestantism was the exclusive feature of success in Britain and the British Empire between 1780 and 1850. Indeed, the large expansion of empire in this period brought forth opportunities through ‘loyalism and civil engagement’ (p. 7) for Irish and Scottish Catholics ultimately to ‘[feel] and [act] every bit as British as their Protestant neighbours’ (p. 2).
The book focuses on the Catholic experience of Atlantic Canada and parts of the British empire in the Caribbean. The former provided ample opportunity for Catholics to make their mark. Scottish and Irish Catholics who settled there were not quiet about advocating for their rights. Atlantic Canada gave them ‘the platform they needed to engage with the ambitions of the state and to demonstrate their value as collaborators in the imperial program’ (p. 39). They could prove their loyalty beyond their religion on the edges of empire. They took advantage of local circumstances, in this case by being speakers of English (and at times Gaelic) close to the French-speaking Quebec. This proximity allowed them even more room to display their own type of Britishness. Quebec had its own privileges since the Quebec Act of 1774, which had allowed for the freedom of worship for the overwhelmingly French Catholic population with the Church itself incorporated into the administration of the colony. Extending rights to other Catholics, especially Irish ones, in other colonies was another matter. While parliament in Westminster had given ‘relief’ to Irish and British Catholics in the 1790s, political office remained off-limits. The Catholics of Nova Scotia, however, pushed for this right. Through their mutual benevolent societies, they impressed imperial authorities and the colonial assembly to achieve political representation six years before the British parliament did so. In 1823 the assembly allowed an Irish Catholic from Cape Breton to take a seat ‘without making the Declaration against Popery and Transubstantiation’ (p. 89). In terms of Catholic Emancipation, Nova Scotia was a pioneer.
Catholics could take advantage of a similar situation in the Caribbean. Kehoe focuses on Trinidad, for example, because of its late addition to the British Empire. Trinidad only became officially British in 1802. It had been Spanish with substantial numbers of French settlers. The colony also had a sizeable enslaved population. With its Spanish and French origins, most of the inhabitants, free and enslaved, were Roman Catholics. Imperial authorities in London realised this and sought the help of British and Irish Catholics to help solve it. In particular, they used the institutional Catholic Church since there was not a core of Irish or Scottish Catholic settlers there. It was to priests and nuns that the authorities turned to maintain order on the island. Kehoe highlights, for example, the role Roman Catholic clergy played in opposing slave insurrections. Catholic schools run by religious women were also important to keeping Catholics from all races loyal to their new imperium. The British government recognised this value through funding Catholic activities. The authorities in London also accepted the Vatican's appointment of a British Vicar Apostolic for the West Indies in 1819 and even an Ultramontane Italian archbishop for the Trinidad capital in 1855.
Kehoe has clearly demonstrated the opportunities for Irish and Scottish Catholics on the ‘Atlantic fringe’ of the British empire, but whether they ever truly ‘felt and acted every bit as British as their Protestant neighbours’ (p. 7) is debatable. Places like Nova Scotia and Trinidad only contained a small proportion of the Catholic population under British rule. Pushing the envelope on Catholic emancipation was acceptable because these places were far from the metropole and/or because local circumstances suited Catholic inclusion. As Kehoe acknowledges, although Irish Catholics had filled the ranks of the British armed forces since the Napoleonic Wars, their rights to attend mass while in service and to have their own chaplains were not acknowledged. The Royal Navy did not have an official Catholic chaplain until 1854. Kehoe, however, still disagrees with Linda Colley's thesis ‘that Protestantism was the glue that kept Britain together’ and sees instead an ‘imperial state . . . defined more by civil engagement than by religious identity’ (p. 6). Her detailed and rigorous research indicates elements of this civil engagement by loyal Catholics, but everything they did they earned in the teeth of virulent Protestant opposition. She, for example, covers well the fact that the Trinidad colonial administration only reluctantly accepted the Italian archbishop. This opposition she acknowledges as a part of the ‘papal aggression rhetoric swirling about in the wake of the 1850 restoration of England's Roman Catholic Hierarchy’ (p. 171).
Perhaps then, as Colley pointed out, Catholic and non-conformist ‘Celtic outsiders’ took advantage of imperial expansion because they were ‘careerists’. They were merely ‘purchasing into what were then the substantial profits of being British’ (Colley, Britons: forging the nation, New Haven 1992, 370). Beyond these profits one wonders how truly ‘British’ the Catholics of Irish and Scottish stock really did feel in the face of continued discrimination and public opprobrium? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, loyal Irish Catholic Britons seeking dominion status within the empire still faced cries of ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’. None the less, Kehoe must be commended for highlighting that ‘the Empire enabled Britons from across the religious spectrum to claim a place in the nation, state, and empire’ (p. 188). Her promise of a ‘next phase of my research’ (p. 189), extending her thesis to the rest of the Caribbean, is therefore welcome.
