For those studying the early modern period, the colonies have often raised issues about the link with the home country and how differences in the way that such colonial settlements were governed reflected back on or might act as a mirror for those in the country from which the colonists and/or their forbears came. Of course, one might think that other questions were more pressing ones for the colonists themselves—slaughtering or being slaughtered by indigenous peoples, not dying of disease and what not—but in most studies of the topic at some point the question arises of how colonial administration might set new precedents for the exercise of power back home. Antoinette Sutto's Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630–1690 covers both this question and a range of other topics, and it deals in particular with questions of religious difference, conformity, and tolerance.

In the book's first section, Sutto makes a valiant effort to address the question of how the colony was constructed and run. But the core of her book lies in the rehearsal of the arguments over the place of the royal prerogative and over which modes of religious expression (at various points on the very wide spectra that, for convenience, are referred to by shorthand names—Puritanism, popery, Catholicism, and so on) might be regarded as politically seditious. Here, in fact, we have a rehearsal of the same kinds of argument that come up in, for example, study after study of Tudor and Stuart Ireland—how was it that regions of the world that were not directly connected with the English/British mainland could be ruled in such a way as to complement and not oppose English/British royal authority?

It has been known for some time that Catholic clergy could live and work in the colonies in ways that were theoretically impossible back home. And, in some sense, Maryland, in its name and through the Calvert family, which held the charter, was a standing example of how certain assumptions about the world after the Reformation did not operate on the other side of the Atlantic. The point was that Lord Baltimore's right to rule came directly from the crown—cutting out the potentially irritating layers of middle management that could, in England, be relied on to complicate matters under the rubric of (Protestant) religion. That did not mean of course that the colony was simply a Catholic one; but it was a kind of model of how Catholics could hold office under the crown. Those who thought that this was not satisfactory obviously tried, and particularly during the bouts of civil strife in seventeenth-century Britain, to put a stop to this, as the author describes. Significantly for the debate about whether Catholicism was inherently royalist, the second baron Baltimore made sure to cut his royalism once the royalist cause had collapsed back in England in the 1640s. The same difficulties confronted, for example, the authorities in Virginia. It was, as Dr. Sutto says, unclear now to what the lord proprietor was supposed to be loyal though, of course, this was an issue that was not confined to the colonies. She underscores this point in chapter 5, where she outlines the legal and rhetorical chaos that ensued when contemporaries started to argue about what was now in conformity with the law.

In part two Sutto includes a chapter on colony and empire and deals with the hidden, or perhaps not-so hidden, economic drivers for colonial endeavor, and especially the money that could be made from tobacco. She also provides a chapter on the difficulties experienced in dealing with native peoples. In conjunction with the next chapter, Sutto paints a picture of a terrifyingly imminent tide of disorder or, rather, a world in which everything was always on the point of disorder. Having described the chaos that attended on so much colonial government, in part three of the book, titled “Crisis,” Sutto returns to some of the issues already raised and, notably, the effects of the circulation of rumors, the reconstruction of which process and its implications for popular politics seems very convincing, for example in explaining the reaction in Maryland to the dethroning of James II. Interestingly the claims about likely insurrection by Catholics and the danger from popery became linked in with the threat of native insurgency. Events in Maryland in this respect mirrored the kind of plot- and rumor-based instability witnessed back home, which Sutto describes very well in the chapter “Glorious Revolutions.” There was a version of Exclusion, and indeed of the 1688 Revolution played out on the other side of the Atlantic: the 1696 Bond of Association was signed in Maryland.

A kind of chronological overview would be useful for nonspecialists. I probably do not read widely enough on this topic, but there were points at which I needed to know more basic stuff—the nuts and bolts of who lived where and who did what and to whom; or what, exactly, were the legal structures which operated in these places. A brief tour of what is archivally available would have also been useful for nonspecialists, even though this information would be less of a problem for those familiar with the literature on early modern colonial government and society. Overall, however, this longue durée account of colonial origins alerts one to the possibility of future research on this fascinating area.