Graduate Student, History
PhD Candidate
Clare College, Cambridge
Thesis Title: The Prayer Book and the flag? Anglican clergymen, Australia and the British Empire, 1788-1850
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David M Thompson, Emeritus Professor of Modern Church History, Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge
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About
I'm in the third year of my doctoral dissertation, which is a prosopographical study of a key figure in the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1850: the Anglican clergyman. Around 250 Anglican clergymen served in the Australian colonies during this period. By 1850 around 1000 Anglican clergymen were serving in the wider empire, making them a significant but neglected presence in colonial and imperial endeavour. By mapping their recruitment, motivations and wider contribution to the formative phases of social, cultural, religious and intellectual life in the Australian colonies, I argue that their influence transcends the common perception of them as little more than agents of the colonial and imperial state.
For many clergymen the state's imperatives were secondary to a distinctly Christian and Enlightenment-inflected vision of the socio-political order, which underwrote protest against the state on various issues, especially among clergyman-journalists. The clergy's influence was further complicated by their social class and professional status, and notions of gentility, masculinity and a nascent muscular Christianity.
