Collaboration across the pond: uniting histories of religious toleration in the American Revolution and European Enlightenment

As part of their seed funding and teaching and research exchange through Cardiff University and the University of Wyoming’s hugely successful strategic international partnership, two historians of eighteenth-century America and Europe, Dr Peter Walker (Assistant Professor in History, Wyoming) and Dr Ashley Walsh (Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, Cardiff), reflect on sharing their research-led teaching and devising future plans. 

How do academics in the humanities work together globally? It’s a question that scholars often ask of subjects like history, where nationally driven institutional parameters and funding structures can make working in large, international teams challenging. Collaborative research in History involves so much more than sharing data, and historians lack the same global platforms as other disciplines. Working together requires a shared intellectual vision and developing that vision demands time and patience. 

It was this challenge that drove Peter Walker and Ashley Walsh to apply for funding for a research and teaching collaboration through their universities’ international partnership. 

‘Even though I studied in the UK and Peter left Britain to study for his PhD in New York, we both knew of each other’s work, and we were appointed to posts in 2019’, explains Ashley. ‘But there seemed no obvious way for us to make time and space to collaborate and build on our shared interests in the religious, intellectual, and political history of eighteenth-century Europe and North America’, Ashley continued. 

Once the world opened after the pandemic, Peter and Ashley were able to apply for seed funding from Wyoming and Cardiff’s Strategic International Partnership. ‘Although we both work on very similar fields’, explained Peter, ‘we had observed that historians of toleration in the European Enlightenment like Ashley and those of religion in Revolutionary America like me conduct our research without interacting much with each other. Scholars often study a single part of the British Empire, work within national contexts, and fail to talk across and above them.’ 

The seed funding enabled both historians to meet, share their research-led teaching through specialist classes with each other’s students, and plan future conferences, funding applications, and publications. 

In December 2024, Peter visited Cardiff and offered BA and MA students specialist masterclasses relating to the research that informs his forthcoming book, The Power of Suffering: Loyalism and the Church of England in the Age of the American Revolution. Ashley returned the favour in May 2025 and gave Wyoming undergraduate historians a course on the history of ideas, using material that will appear in his forthcoming essay on that approach to history in Writing History: Theory and Practice, and he gave a seminar paper related to his next book, The Enlightenment and Catholic Emancipation in Britain and its Empire, 1745-1829. The exchange also included archival research visits to the National Archives in London and the William L. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to plan future research collaborations. 

As a result of their time together, Peter and Ashley are organising a major international, interdisciplinary conference on ‘Religion, Toleration, and the Enlightenment in the Atlantic World’. The conference is designed to bring together historians, political theorists, and sociologists to examine how arguments for religious acceptance and pluralism emerged through exchanges between Europe and North America across the early modern period. While historians have long studied connections and exchanges between the peoples and empires that spanned the Atlantic Ocean in relation to slavery, trade, and commerce, Peter and Ashley will apply it to religion, philosophy, and ideas. 

In preparation for the conference, they are co-writing an article about a significant but neglected figure in the history of religious toleration in the Atlantic World. William Knox was an Irish Protestant landowner of Calvinist extraction whose political theology, or his theory of the relationship between Christianity and politics, entailed a distinctively hierarchical vision of the Church of England. Over the course of his career and in many pamphlets, he became one of the most influential imperialist thinkers of the late eighteenth century. 

Although he made his way in the American colonies and became an unofficial advisor to government ministers on the governance of America, he was later dismissed by the Georgia Assembly as its agent for defending the Stamp Act (1765), a law passed by the British Parliament that required American colonists to use stamped paper for all legal documents, newspapers, and other printed materials to help fund British troops stationed in the colonies after the French and Indian War. As a result, he became associated with the North ministry’s coercion of America. Knox owned an American plantation worked by enslaved people, and he defended slavery on religious grounds by arguing that it enabled the education and conversion of Africa. 

Knox can certainly be seen as an authoritarian figure, but he also defended toleration for Catholics in the newly conquered Province of Quebec, a development that many American Revolutionaries opposed and – along with the Stamp Act – counted as one of the ‘Intolerable Acts’ that drove them to the events of 1776. He consistently argued for Catholic freedom in his native Ireland along with the liberalisation of trade between Britain and Ireland, which was then heavily restricted as part of the wider mercantilist system of imperial commerce. 

Knox applied ideas of toleration and political economy that historians today associate with the Enlightenment to fashion what he perceived to be a modern, pluralistic, and increasingly diverse empire. He is therefore a figure who further complicates the tensions and contradictions within the emerging liberal imperialism of the turn of the nineteenth century. In their article, Peter and Ashley will explore how Knox represents a perhaps unexpected but revealing test case for how Enlightenment ideas of religious pluralism circulated across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Seed funding through Cardiff and Wyoming’s strategic partnership is making possible a research collaboration between two historians at early stages of their careers. It is also an example of how scholars in the humanities are working on a global basis and transcending national borders to share their research with international audiences and students.