ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals how international and itinerant British Catholics were and how much they relied upon their family, friends, and connections to overcome religious barriers in trade. It challenges existing interpretations of early modern British Catholicism by examining the ways in which British Catholic merchants moved beyond religious divisions and across national borders in order to sustain British trade. It argues that they played an important part in early modern commercial expansion. Although Catholicism in the British Isles implied marginalisation, the religious affiliation of Catholic merchants was instrumental in fostering trade networks, and in securing successful economic strategies with both Protestant partners at home and Catholic ones abroad. They secured social integration through economic inclusion, thereby defying the stereotype of a prosecuted community. Furthermore, this chapter challenges the widely accepted notion in modern historiography of a Protestant national identity constructed against a Catholic “other.” Catholic merchants fostered networks of interfaith trade within an emerging Protestant empire, fundamentally sustaining British commercial expansion.
