William R.Smith

Colman (1673Colman ( -1747)), for nearly 50 years minister of the Brattle Street Church, Boston, and one of the leading ministers in New England and the Atlantic religious world in the first half of the eighteenth century.Colman is familiar to historians, but Smith seeks to use his extensive surviving correspondence to explore what he calls the making of the Dissenting Interest in the British North Atlantic world.He makes the ambitious claim that his study extends the bounds of current scholarship by incorporating New England and Scotland (but not apparently Ireland) into a history of English Protestant Dissent, and to show Dissent's investment in British imperialism."In sum, the chapters of this book combine to argue that the history of Protestant Dissent is fundamentally a transatlantic story, one shaped as much by agents and brokers on the provincial edges of the British Empire as by those at its center" (p.3).He sees letters, and the ties of friendship they encouraged, as binding together "loyal subjects of the Crown on both sides of the Atlantic"; bonds that "linked a transatlantic community of Dissenting Protestants -Congregationalists and Presbyterians in England, Presbyterians in Scotland, and Congregationalists like himself in New England" (p. 2).More conventionally, Smith identifies not only the role of letters in keeping Dissenting communities in contact across the Atlantic, and so enabling them to collaborate, but also the limits of their cooperation.He argues this relationship changed over time, and under pressure from the Great Awakening it broke down.The book's subtitle "Networking in the Dissenting Atlantic" indicates the focus of the book.It forms part of Palgrave Macmillan "Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World" series.In 1695, Colman sailed to England, where he remained for 4 years serving as a Presbyterian minister, first in Cambridge and then in Bath.Smith believes that historians have overlooked the significance of Colman's sojourn in England, which he sees as crucial in shaping Colman's career.It introduced Colman to the leading Presbyterians in London, giving him valuable contacts for the future, but, as the result of spending 4 years at the centre of the British empire, also an imperial vision of the Atlantic world.Yet the significance of Colman's Presbyterian ministry and ordination in England is not explored.In 1699 Colman was persuaded to return to Boston to take charge of the new Brattle Street Church.In Chapter 3, Smith develops his argument for the creation of a Dissenting identity extending beyond England to include New England.He sees Neal's History of New England (1720), together with Wodrow's History of the Suffering of the Church of Scotland (1721-2), as creating a collective narrative that gave shape to the transatlantic "Dissenting Interest," but also 626

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