Divide and Tolerate: Imperial Secularisms in Ireland, India, and Britain, 1774- 1815 A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Justin Blake Biel IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Professor Anna Clark May 2014 © Justin Biel 2014 i Acknowledgements It is a little overwhelming to think back on several years of graduate study and to take stock of all of the debts, scholarly or otherwise, that I have accumulated over that period. I am fortunate to have had the consistent support and encouragement of the faculty, staff, and students in the history department at the University of Minnesota since my first days as a graduate student. Should I fail in the following paragraphs to mention by name anyone who provided insight, inspiration, guidance, hospitality, financial support, or friendship, the omission is my mistake and unintentional. I owe my first and deepest thanks to my adviser Anna Clark. Anna not only set me on the track of this dissertation topic by supervising me in a research partnership project on Richard Johnson; her edits, suggestions, and questions at every step of the writing process made this a much clearer and more readable dissertation. In every other aspect of graduate training, her guidance has been unfailingly astute. Anna’s clarifying voice in the field of modern British history offers a model of scholarship that I will continue to strive to reproduce. Many University of Minnesota faculty members have been generous with their time, insights, and encouragement. From my second year on, Michael Hancher took an interest in my work, and afforded me opportunities to explore related historiography and printed primary source material as his research assistant on his “Construction of English in India” project. Sarah Chambers read the original dissertation prospectus and was probably the first to suggest that there were at least two separate projects there. Pat McNamara’s encouragement, good-naturedness, and teaching advice have consistently ii helped me lessen the burden of self-doubt. I owe special thanks to JB Shank for several years of various kinds of mentorship and role modeling. Since my second semester, as a graduate student I have appreciated and benefited from JB’s perspective, insight, energy, thoughtful questions, and capacity to give students the feeling of participation in an academic community. I thank all of my committee members—Kirsten Fischer, Ajay Skaria, and Gloria Raheja, Anna Clark, and JB Shank—for their consummate service as reviewers and for their engagement in the task of helping me find the best frame for this research. My road through graduate school has been smoothed by financial support from a number of sources connected to the University of Minnesota. I am especially thankful for the departmental fellowship established by David and Rosemary Good, which made survival of my first semester as a graduate student possible. I also owe special thanks to Hella Mears, whose fellowship fund made it genuinely possible for this to become a transnational and comparative research project. The Mears Fellowship gave me a summer to become moderately versed in modern Irish historiography and to carry out the research in Dublin that is reflected in Chapter 4. Lastly, the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota has also been generous in its support for my efforts, most recently by providing a writing-up year on one of its Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships. I am also extremely grateful for the year of supervision I received from Miles Taylor at the Institute of Historical Research in London. Miles was always helpful in pressing me to recognize what was distinctive, in relation to previous scholarship, about the impressions that I was forming as I worked with my sources. I did not always have iii great answers to offer to his questions when he asked them, but the notes I scribbled down after meetings in Miles’s office at the IHR are reflected throughout the dissertation, especially in the introduction. For my year at the IHR, I have the Andrew Mellon Foundation to thank, along with the IHR’s scholarship committee and its fellowships officer James Lees. I am grateful to James, as well, for his comments on an early rendition of the paper I presented with Peter Marshall at a conference at Gregynog, Wales, on the Warren Hastings cadre of Orientalists. Elements of that paper have featured more strongly in this dissertation (in Chapter 2) than I ever envisioned. I may not have found a way to include my research on Richard Johnson into the dissertation at all had it not been for Peter’s invitation to join him in presenting on Johnson at Gregynog. Thanks are due, as well, to Michael Franklin for organizing the conference and to Carl Ernst for his expertise on Persian-language sources. In Britain, I have been fortunate to be able to count on the hospitality and conviviality of many friends. Each has made it possible for me to extend my time in the archives by that somehow necessary extra couple of weeks during one research trip or another. Very many thanks, in particular, to Pete and MaryAnn Broughton, Rob Bahr and Deb Mellor, Caroline and Raj Paranandi, Chris Dale, Simon and Catherine Watson, Mark Macleod, Owen Greene and Francesca McKenzie, Ben Stride and Danielle Harris, Pipp Saul-Harrah, and Oleg Benesch and Helena Simmonds. At home, the list of colleagues from whom I have drawn inspiration and insight is nearly endless. Early on, I realized that I had lucked out when I decided to join the cohort iv I did in the history department at the University of Minnesota. My favorite part of having been a graduate student at the U of M has been the opportunity to become a major fan of the work done by so many of my colleagues. I would particularly like to thank Anna’s dissertation group—Kelly Donahue, Aaron Windel, Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Bryan Pekel, Johnny Trutor, Garrett Karrberg, Elizabeth Williams, Dan Paltzer, and Elizabeth Dillenburg—for their careful reading and constructive criticism of drafts of many sections of this dissertation. In addition, without Leslie and Bryan as companions in coursework and prelim exam preparation, I doubt I would have made it into the research and writing stage. Other frequent companions in seminars whose intellects and accomplishments have inspired me to complete this dissertation include Emily Bruce, Fernando Calderón, Boyd Cothran, Seth Epstein, Alan Fujishin, Robert Gilmer, Adriana Gordillo, Nate Holdren, Melanie Huska, Kevin Mummey, Jecca Namakkal, Eric Otremba, Drew Thompson, and Liz Zanoni. I am deeply grateful to Boyd and Tanya Cothran for their personal warmth and for crash courses in sushi-making and cider- pressing, among other good times shared. I will always appreciate Liz Zanoni’s positivity. It was wonderful to go through most of graduate school with a kindred spirit— and such a good role model. With Melanie Huska, hemos compartido casi toda la experiencia. I have appreciated all of our summer afternoons working (at a leisurely pace) in the library and all of Melanie’s enthusiasm for what we do. I continue to be thankful that she still has ties to bring her back to Minneapolis. I have also relied on a great web of friends in the Twin Cities for their emotional support, insight, and encouragement. In particular, I am immensely grateful to Kate v McCleary and Emme Bruns for their love and friendship. We made a good team of aspiring PhD students, all living under the same roof. I am proud, finally, to be giving us a one hundred percent completion rate. I am also forever indebted to Chris Lamping for showing me a number of intellectual ropes. Chris has exposed me to a wide array of theoretical works that never formed part of my formal graduate curriculum. His outlook—summed up in his words, “You know me, I’ll read anything”—has offered me an enduring image of what it means to lead an intellectual life. I have dedicated this dissertation to my family: Tim, Melanie, and Anga Biel; Anduin, Doug, and Jean Wilhide. Having moved around as much as I have, it has been my good fortune to develop a few pseudo-families in different places. But it is deeply satisfying to recognize that I write for these six people and that I will continue to do so for as long into the future as I can foresee. My mom, dad, and sister have all shown me the meaning of dedication to their crafts. Their ceaseless concern for my well-being and their unwavering faith in me, which has sometimes exceeded my own, have been extraordinary—my gratitude to them is boundless. Doug and Jean have shown me extraordinary openness, and I am indebted to them for their patience and faith, as well. My best writing for Andy has been reserved for greeting cards—past, present, and future. I owe both my livelihood and my vivacity to her. I thank her for sticking with me; I can’t wait for the rest of our life together. vi Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my family: Tim, Melanie, Anga, and Caroline Biel; Anduin, Doug, and Jean Wilhide. vii Abstract Exploring the published polemic, unpublished memoranda, and private correspondence of colonial policy-shapers, this dissertation analyzes debates over the possibility of Catholic emancipation in Ireland and government superintendence of the “native” religious infrastructure in India. It asks how colonialism influenced British understandings of religious toleration and, in turn, how changing notions of toleration organized the discussion of secularist policy in India, Ireland, and Britain. In general, it argues, toleration in the colonies followed a “prudential” pattern.