Catholic Interests and the Politics of English Overseas Expansion 1660–1689

AbstractThroughout the reign of Charles II, a growing number of Catholics entered into the civil and military infrastructure of the overseas colonies. While Maryland was consolidated as a center of settlement, a new crop of English and Irish officeholders shaped the political development of Tangier, New York and the Leeward Islands. Their careers highlighted the opportunities of overseas expansion as a route into the public domain: a chance for Catholics to sidestep the penal restrictions of the three kingdoms and construct an alternative relationship with the crown. This article examines the emergence of Catholic authority within the plantations, and situates the experiment within larger shifts in strategic and ideological debate over English colonization. I suggest that experiences in the colonies invigorated economic and political strategies that became central to the advancement of Catholic interests in the domestic realm. While colonial trade bolstered Catholic estates against penal pressures, the new settlements provided the training ground for attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of confessional pluralism with commercial flourishing and civil allegiance. The effect, however, was to raise conflict in colonial politics and heighten anxieties in the domestic realm over the effects of overseas plantation. I argue that by uncovering a neglected sphere of “recusant history” we gain new insights into the ideological fragilities that disrupted the pursuit of territories overseas. Catholic promotions exposed a growing tension between the “Protestant interest” and the principles and practices that informed the expansion of the Stuart realm.This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Cambridge University Press

Master of Fine Arts

thesisMaster of ArtsArt/Art HistoryThis paper explores the evolution of the concept of the art world, starting with the going-away, in order to show that effective art criticism requires knowledge of the art world. The nature of criticism implies that a critic logically identify, define and evaluate a work of art. Reasons are used to justify the critical interpretation (the identification, definition and evaluation) of a work of art, and these reasons are found in what Arthur Danto called the art world. The precursors to the art world include artist colony, bohemia and avant-garde-all of which constitute what Michael Jacobs termed the going-away. Previous examinations of the going-away were partial because they addressed the historical context and ignored the critical perspective implicit in these artistic communities. This historical bias grew out of the dominant, modernist historical definition of art which dictated that art was definable in visual terms and evaluated by developmental standards. In other words, modernist art was defined and evaluated in ways that did not implore a knowledge of the going-away's critical perspective. Thus, the various stages of the art world's evolution from the nineteenth century artist colonies, to the nineteenth and twentieth century bohemia, through the twentieth century avant- garde, have been addressed insufficiently in sentimental memoirs and considered peripherally in criticism. Danto's delineation of the term the art world grew out of a philosophical reevaluation of art's historical definability in the postmodern. The term profiles a theoretical and social structure that was seen as a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition to interpreting art throughout modernism. Through review and analysis of the art world's evolution, its essential role in art criticism as a necessary condition to identifying and evaluating art materializes. The art world is a necessary condition of art's definability because it differentiates relevant artistic endeavors from stagnant institutional mandates and, subsequently, it distinguishes art from nonart