Empire and Emancipation

Empire and Emancipation poses serious challenges to the prevailing historiography about the life and work of Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, within the British Empire from 1780 to the end of the Great Famine. Meticulously researched, this book considers the British Empire as a vehicle for the growth of Irish and Scottish Catholic middle classes within its colonial fringes in the North Atlantic. This book will be devoured by historians of the Catholic Church, Ireland, and the British Empire, as its claims will certainly cause considerable historical debate.

From Newfoundland to the West Indies, Scottish and Irish Catholics sought opportunities on the fringes of Britain's Atlantic world, proving themselves loyal subjects while informally emancipating themselves from anti-Catholic legal constraints at home. Empire and Emancipation persuasively shows that Catholics were deeply embedded in the institutions of empire. By destabilizing the conventional wisdom that the British Empire was Protestant, and in her provocative use of 'emancipation, ' Kehoe presses the reader to think critically and deeply about how religious and racial minorities shaped the complex political and cultural forces of nineteenth-century imperialism.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this revisionist study challenges traditional perceptions of the British Empire as a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon Protestant space. By evaluating issues of identity and agency among Irish and Scottish Catholics on the Atlantic fringe, it demonstrates that these maritime colonies offered ethnic and religious minorities a clear opportunity to articulate their diversity, demonstrate their loyalty, and expand the boundaries of their citizenship, often through collaborations that contributed significantly to the evolution of British imperial identity.