Benjamin Colman’s Epistolary World, 1688-1755

This book tells the story of the Rev. Benjamin Colman (1673-1747), one of eighteenth-century America’s most influential ministers, and his transatlantic social world of letters. Exploring his epistolary network reveals how imperial culture diffused through the British Atlantic and formed the Dissenting Interest in America, England, and Scotland. Traveling to and living in England between 1695-1699, Colman forged enduring connections with English Dissenters that would animate and define his ministry for nearly a half century. The chapters reassemble Colman’s epistolary web to illuminate the Dissenting Interest’s broad range of activities through the circulation of Dissenting histories, libraries, missionaries, revival news, and provincial defenses of religious liberty. This book argues that over the course of Colman’s life the Dissenting Interest integrated, extended, and ultimately detached, presenting the history of Protestant Dissent as fundamentally a transatlantic story shaped by the provincial edges of the British Empire.  

William R. Smith is Associate Director of the Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum and Co-Director of the Museum Science and Management graduate program at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. Specializing in the history of eighteenth-century North America and Atlantic studies, he has taught courses in American religious history and archival studies at the University of Notre Dame, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Tulsa.