Exporting radicalism within the empire: Scots Presbyterian political values in Scotland and British North America, c.1815-c.1850

This thesis offers a reinterpretation of radicalism and reform movements in Scotland and British North America in the first half of the nineteenth century by examining the relationship between ecclesiology and political action. It considers the ways in which Presbyterian political theory and the memory of the seventeenth-century Covenanting movement were used to justify political reform. In particular it examines attitudes in Scotland to Catholic emancipation, the Reform Act of 1832, the disestablishment of the national Churches, and the Chartist movement; and it considers agitation in Upper Canada and Nova Scotia for the disestablishment of the established Church and the institution of responsible government. It emphasises the continued relevance of religion in political culture, tracing the survival of the Scottish Covenanting tradition and charting its significance within the wider British empire. It argues that there existed a transatlantic Presbyterian community and that to some degree Presbyterian-inflected radicalism in this period was a North Atlantic phenomenon