Helen Kilburn Catholic Kinship and Colonialism, the Brent Family

This paper focuses on Helen Kilburn's current research towards the development of a database that reconstructs the capital networks of Catholic planters in Maryland before the Catholic Baltimore proprietorship was deposed in 1689 as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) in England. The research is beginning to reveal that these capital networks were structured along kinship and confessional lines, and for this reason she suggests that Catholics used colonialism to establish what today we might call "off-shore accounts" for the purpose of protecting community wealth and social standing from the financial and social censure they experienced under anti-Catholic penal codes in England. Helen Kilburn is Assistant Rector of the University of Notre Dame Global Gateway and Conference Secretary of the Catholic Record Society. This talk was given to members of the English Catholic History Association in July 2022.