ABSTRACT
The Christians who established the foundations of the Catholic tradition in Africa and South America came from a society which de ned itself, to a signi cant extent, through its common Catholic identity. Christendom was a Europe of the Catholic Church, and the extension of that faith and its institutional apparatus were bound together amidst the commercial and colonial imperatives which also informed the creation of the Atlantic world in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although a desire to establish more ef cient trade routes to the east led to the arrival of Christian Europeans in both Africa and South America, from the moment of that arrival an evangelistic purpose of conversion emerged as central to their intentions in both continents. Although signi cant local and regional differences and distinctiveness existed throughout western Europe, a common Catholic identity was still potent at the beginnings of extra-European evangelical and entrepreneurial enterprises. In such a context Christopher Columbus can be described as a ‘militant Catholic’ even though Christian evangelism was not initially a central motivation behind his voyages.1 The rst Portuguese to arrive in West Africa in the fteenth century introduced themselves rst and foremost as Christians, and left a drawing of the cross to identify themselves to potential converts.2 John Cabot landed in Newfoundland in 1497, sponsored by the English king Henry VII and claiming the territory in the name of the pope while armed with a cruci x. The most striking contrast underlying the spread of Catholicism throughout the Atlantic world can be found in the precise nature of the Catholicising process and, especially, the political context informing it. The conversion of the Amerindians was part of an outright territorial conquest, while the willing adhesion of some African leaders to Christianity played a signi cant role in establishing a more ‘diplomatic’ relationship between the European powers and the African elite; a distinction between an ‘inclusive’ version of Catholicism incorporated traditional beliefs into a Catholic framework, against an ‘exclusive’ one focused on confessional purity.3 The later development of a French presence in North America operated as a kind of midpoint on this spectrum: neither a native-led movement nor part of a full-scale territorial conquest, the experiences of French missionaries had sustained and signi cant echoes with some of the counterreformation responses to Catholic unorthodoxy within post-Reformation Europe
itself.4 In the British territories, the experiences of the Catholic minority were shaped by the ingrained nature of Protestant anti-Catholicism, and respite from persecution was found only in those few colonies which supported religious toleration.5
