Empires of God - Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic

Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic



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English | 344 pages | University of Pennsylvania Press; 1st edition (December 21, 2010) | 0812242890 | PDF | 23.65 Mb

Religion and empire were inseparable forces in the early modern Atlantic world. Religious passions and conflicts drove much of the expansionist energy of post-Reformation Europe, providing both a rationale and a practical mode of organizing the dispersal and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people from the Old World to the New World. Exhortations to conquer new peoples were the lingua franca of Western imperialism, and men like the mystically inclined Christopher Columbus were genuinely inspired to risk their lives and their fortunes to bring the gospel to the Americas. And in the thousands of religious refugees seeking asylum from the vicious wars of religion that tore the continent apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these visionary explorers found a ready pool of migrantsEnglish Puritans and Quakers, French Huguenots, German Moravians, Scots-Irish Presbyteriansequally willing to risk life and limb for a chance to worship God in their own way.