After 1830 Catholicism in Britain and Ireland was practised and experienced within an increasingly secure Church that was able to build a national presence and public identity. With the passage of the Catholic Relief Act (Catholic Emancipation) in 1829 came civil rights for the United Kingdom's Catholics, which in turn gave Catholic organisations the opportunity to carve out a place in civil society within Britain and its empire. This Catholic revival saw both a strengthening of central authority structures in Rome, (creating a more unified transnational spiritual empire with the person of the Pope as its centre), and a reinvigoration at the local and popular level through intensified sacramental, devotional, and communal practices. After the 1840s, Catholics in Britain and Ireland not only had much in common as a consequence of the Church's global drive for renewal, but the development of a shared Catholic culture across the two islands was deepened by the large-scale migration from Ireland to many parts of Britain following the Great Famine of 1845. Yet at the same time as this push towards a degree of unity and uniformity occurred, there were forces which powerfully differentiated Catholicism on either side of the Irish Sea. Four very different religious configurations of religious majorities and minorities had evolved since the sixteenth-century Reformation in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Each had its own dynamic of faith and national identity and Catholicism had played a vital role in all of them, either as 'other' or, (in the case of Ireland), as the majority's 'self'. Identities of religion, nation, and empire, and the intersection between them, lie at the heart of this volume. They are unpacked in detail in thematic chapters which explore the shared Catholic identity that was built between 1830 and 1913 and the ways in which that identity was differentiated by social class, gender and, above all, nation. Taken together, these chapters show how Catholicism was integral to the history of the United Kingdom in this period.

In God's Empire, Hilary M. Carey charts Britain's nineteenth-century transformation from Protestant nation to free Christian empire through the history of the colonial missionary movement. This wide-ranging reassessment of the religious character of the second British empire provides a clear account of the promotional strategies of the major churches and church parties which worked to plant settler Christianity in British domains. Based on extensive use of original archival and rare published sources, the author explores major debates such as the relationship between religion and colonization, church-state relations, Irish Catholics in the empire, the impact of the Scottish Disruption on colonial Presbyterianism, competition between Evangelicals and other Anglicans in the colonies, and between British and American strands of Methodism in British North America.

This volume describes in detail more than 3900 newspapers and periodicals in all fields: art, literature, theatre, science, music, law, agriculture, labour, politics, trade, home and church. Its indexes list all periodicals published in each Irish city and town, and gives readers access to such diverse subjects as the slave trade, town directories, gardening, geology, fiction, folklore, antiquities, public health. Locations are provided for most titles, as well as a description of the political and religious orientation, indexing, personnel, issuing bodies, frequency and publishing history. An essential reference work for every Irish Studies program and reference library. "A project of enormous importance. ... A wealth of information ... thoroughly indexed ... (with) a graceful h umane appearance."-Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. ".. .the place where nineteenth century Irish research begins."--James Harner, in the MLA's Research Sources in English. "It is above all the indexes which make an already impressively detailed and exhaustive piece of research into a fundamental 'must' for 19th century historians."--F. J. G. Robinson, Director, The 19th Century Short Title Catalogue. "Remarkable comprehensiveness and skillful cross-indexing. ... The Directory will prove indispensible."--Richard Morton, English Studies in Canada. "The well-nigh definitive guide to the raw materials for a history of Irish journalism. ... Its acquisition is unavoidable."--W. G. Wheeler, Queen's University, Belfast