Benjamin Colmans Epistolary World, 1688-1755: Networking in the Dissenting Atla [Paperback]

This book tells the story of the Rev. Benjamin Colman (1673-1747), one of eighteenth-century Americas most influential ministers, and his transatlantic social world of letters. Exploring his epistolary network reveals how imperial culture diffused through the British Atlantic and formed the Dissenting Interest in America, England, and Scotland. Traveling to and living in England between 1695-1699, Colman forged enduring connections with English Dissenters that would animate and define his ministry for nearly a half century. The chapters reassemble Colmans epistolary web to illuminate the Dissenting Interests broad range of activities through the circulation of Dissenting histories, libraries, missionaries, revival news, and provincial defenses of religious liberty. This book argues that over the course of Colmans life the Dissenting Interest integrated, extended, and ultimately detached, presenting the history of Protestant Dissent as fundamentally a transatlantic story shaped by the provincial edges of the British Empire.  

Introduction.- 1. Benjamin Colman Travels to England, 1695-1699.- 2.  Nonconformist Histories and the Creation of a Transatlantic Dissenting Narrative Identity, 1717-1735.- 3. An Empire of Books: Spreading Libraries in the British Atlantic World.- 4. The Ties of Political Friendship and the Narragansett Property Conflict, 1720-1752.- 5. The Apogee and Fracturing of the Dissenting Interest in the Age of Revival, 1730-1747.- 6. Samuel Davies Travels to England, 1753-1755.

Benjamin Colmans Epistolary World aims at and largely delivers a solid discussion of transatlantic religious politics in the late Stuart and early Hanoverian eras. (Carla Gardina Pestana, Church History, Vol. 92 (4), December, 2023)

William R. Smith is Associate Director of the Helmerich Center for American Research at Gl³.