Religion and Colonization

For the process of European expansion and the colonial endeavors from the late 15th century to the 19th, historians of the Atlantic world have more often than not identified the imperial states as the most powerful players: the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English (later British). From these empires’ perspectives, colonization was also about converting the “heathen” to, first, Catholicism, and then, with the Reformation and the rise of different varieties of Protestantism, to other denominations as well. Colonization in the early modern period was as much about religious missions, about “the harvest of souls,” as it was about expanding territorial boundaries and economic resources (Lachenicht, et al. 2016, cited under General Overviews). What Lauric Henneton has dubbed the “spiritual geopolitics” of the Atlantic world (Henneton 2014, cited under Puritan Colonization Schemes) is an important feature in the conquest and colonization of the Atlantic world. While Catholic and Protestant institutions supported the imperial powers’ colonization schemes, the former had agendas of their own, which at times clashed with more worldly colonization schemes. Among the most powerful of these religious enterprises, we find next to the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Capuchins a number of Protestant churches and communities. This is especially true for the later 17th and 18th centuries with so-called evangelical Protestantisms: Quakers, Halle Pietists, Moravians, and others. Many of these religious orders and communities had not only Atlantic but global networks that stretched from European to African, American, and Asian worlds—in the 19th century also to areas within the Pacific including Australia and New Zealand. In the early modern period, many religious minorities were heavily persecuted for their faith. Forced to migrate, a number of imperial states decided to “make use” of these religious minorities to populate their overseas colonies, to strengthen their might and prosperity. Tolerance, then, was about “suffering” the “religious other”—and about utilitarian motives that included colonization schemes (Lachenicht 2017, cited under General Overviews). Not only Sephardi Jews but also Huguenots, Quakers, Moravians, and others became—as Jonathan Israel has put it for Sephardi Jews—“agents and victims of empire” (Israel 2002, cited under Sephardi Jews and Colonization).