Dr Charlotte Smith receives a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant

Dr Charlotte Smith has been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant of £9982.74 for her project: “The Colonial Bishoprics Fund and the Birth of the Worldwide Anglican Communion: Legal Transplants, Networks and Constitutional Change in the British Empire”. This project offers a fascinating case study of the impact of common law approaches to empire upon the transmission of law and constitutional ideas within the British Empire. It also, at a pivotal point in the development of the Worldwide Anglican Communion today, seeks to inform a better understanding of the legal frameworks, ideologies, and relationships underpinning global Anglicanism, and of the forms and consequences of legal relationships between metropolitan and daughter churches across the common law world. It achieves these two objectives through the completion of the first ever legal history of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund. This charitable trust, founded by individual subscribers in London in 1841, was the primary means of funding and co-ordinating Church of England efforts to export the Anglican Establishment, with all its legal and constitutional privileges, across the expanding British Empire. Through its activities the seeds of what became global Anglicanism were sown.

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