British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age

A rich picture of commercial life among the British Catholic merchants operating in the Atlantic and Mediterranean at the end of the Stuart era. British Catholic merchants in the long eighteenth century occupied an ambiguous social space. On the one hand, their religion made them marginal and suspect figures in a nation increasingly defining itself by its Protestantism against the Catholic powers of Europe. On the other, their Catholicism, particularly as national rivalries erupted into outright