Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism, edited by Evan Haefeli

The significance of ‘popery’ and opposition to it in early modern Britain and Ireland has long been recognised by historians. In the edited volume Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism, Evan Haefeli argues that opposition to popery also needs to be acknowledged as a central force shaping the emerging British Empire. The volume begins this work by bringing together studies of England, Scotland, Ireland, and early America to show how opposition to popery ‘helped knit the Protestant British-American world together – and tear it apart’ (p. 16). Arguing that we must distinguish between ‘anti-Catholicism’, defined as an irrational hatred of Catholics and their faith, and ‘anti-popery’, defined as a coherent ideology focused on traits associated with the Church of Rome, the volume asserts that anti-popery exerted a profound influence on the American colonies. In particular, it seeks to show how anti-popery became so infused in early American political culture that the colonists felt compelled to revolt when Britain’s government began granting some measure of relief to Catholics at home and abroad. Thus the revolutionary concept of ‘liberty’ was underpinned by anti-popery.