Christian Hospitality and the Case for Religious Refuge in Interregnum England

Abstract

Abstract This article shows how English supporters of Jewish immigration in the 1650s articulated a universal model of Christian hospitality for all foreigners fleeing religious persecution, regardless of whether they adhered to the Protestant faith of their English hosts. It thus urges a reconsideration of the widespread assumption that European Christians in this era were willing only to admit their own co-religionists as refugees. At the same time, however, the article points to the 1650s as a pivotal turning point in the relationship between the resettlement of refugees and the development of the British Empire. Severe crises of depopulation in newly conquered Ireland and Jamaica prompted a proliferation of schemes to resettle refugees in those two spaces. Empire, it was argued, would allow the English to be benevolent and charitable without having to share their own country with people different from themselves.