Covenants and Commerce

Abstract

The values of free trade, decentralized governance, and staunch anti-Catholicism that defined the British Empire in the eighteenth century were the result of decades of struggle between the Stuart monarchy and its subjects over the future direction of the empire. At the heart of this struggle were Scottish Presbyterians, who conceived this vision of empire while in exile as religious refugees in colonial North America. They opposed the Crown’s preference for an exclusionary, mercantilist, and avowedly Anglican (even crypto-Catholic) empire and fought to undermine it following the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. They succeeded thanks to the religious and trade networks they created to connect their various diasporic communities in the Dutch Republic, northeastern America, and the Caribbean. Their networks also connected them to sympathetic colonial allies who provided the credit and patronage they needed to undermine English restrictions on their work and worship. Between 1660 and 1715, their success as smugglers and religious rabble-rousers, combined with the threat posed by the Darien scheme they financed and supplied, persuaded officials in London that embracing Scottish Presbyterians was a better means of advancing England’s imperial interests than continuing to marginalize them. The success of their networks during their period in exile left many Scots well placed to capitalize on their new status as legitimated Britons after 1707. They quickly filled leading commercial, military, political, and religious offices where they could continue to shape the British Empire in North America according to their vision in the eighteenth century.