This conclusion begins by showing how money and religion had become intertwined in the minds of many Irish Catholics by the end of the period under review, by way of a row that erupted over the design of new coinage in the new Irish Free State. It goes on to argue that the book’s findings have implications for understanding of the Church’s place in the wider economy, for how power operated in the relationship between Church and laity, and for our understanding of the roles played by the laity in the so-called ‘devotional revolution’. It finally argues that a more intimate portrait of the Catholic population has been achieved through the book’s focus on their everyday financial transactions with their Church.

The introduction sets out the main themes of the book: that the role of gesture in religious worship was highlighted by the Reformation, and that it was especially significant in the English Reformation. It develops these themes by showing that gesture was central to some of the key concepts of the English Reformation: indifference, uniformity and conformity. First, were certain gestures essential to worship, or were they merely matters of indifference? Secondly, was variation in gesture permissible in public worship, or should all people use the same gestures in order to create a uniform Protestant body? Finally, was gesture a matter of free choice, or did the church have the right to impose gestural conformity on its members? It argues that these questions of church order opened up a larger epistemological question about what gestures meant, or whether, in the end, they meant anything at all.

Isidore’s Etymologies, written in the early seventh century, offers one of the most extensive analyses of the city, yet they have been dismissed as an antiquarian compilation of out-of-date views. Isidore emerges as more than an antiquarian, someone at the heart of contemporary politics with close relations with the Visigothic kings. The concern of these kings for cities comes out in their foundation of new cities, especially Reccopolis. Isidore’s writing, far from being buried in a classical past, is more influenced by Christian writings, and shows memories of the past recycled and reinterpreted. For him the city is timeless, stretches throughout the history known to him, and covers an area wider than the classical, including Persia. His detailed analysis of the city may contain antiquarian details, but is engaged in a present and the foundation of new cities.

This chapter explores the emergence, from the 1860s, of lotteries as a crucial fundraising tool for the Irish Catholic Church, one especially used to acquire capital to construct its rapidly growing built infrastructure. The chapter establishes the scale of the ‘drawings of prizes’ phenomenon, before arguing that lotteries worked effectively as a fundraising mechanism because they facilitated broad class engagement among the laity at home and held transnational appeal to the diaspora and non-Catholics alike. This chapter finally traces the roles of sectarian tensions, social and economic change, and legal limits in the gradual decline of such lotteries by the 1910s.

Chapter 5 discusses the custom of hat honour, a crucial marker of status in the early modern period, in which men took off their hats as a gesture of civility to social equals or deference to social superiors. The importance of hat honour is underlined by the Quaker challenge to it in the 1650s and 1660s. This was a refusal to observe the norms of civility, but also part of a radically unorthodox bodily habitus which provoked intense disquiet among the Quakers’ opponents as well as division among the Quakers themselves. The central focus of the chapter, however, is on hat honour in church. In the sixteenth century it was the custom for men to wear their hats in church, only removing them at certain points in the service in accordance with the biblical injunction to uncover their heads when ‘praying or prophesying’. But the 1604 Canons ordered that ‘no man shall cover his head in the church or chapel in the time of divine service’, effectively treating the church as a place apart where the normal rules of hat honour did not apply. This exposed an underlying disagreement over the nature of sacred space.

We use the implosion of the first Commission of Inquiry into Liberated Africans in the Caribbean (1821–26) to examine the deep discomfort of key conservatives with the politics of amelioration. Anti-slavery commissioner, John Dougan, and his conservative counterpart, Thomas Moody fell out when two young and very brave women attempted to use the commission to protest the conditions under which they laboured. Their testimony prompted thousands of pages of debate over whether and to what degree the commission should inquire into the relationship of masters and enslaved people rescued and indentured under the Abolition Act; which rules governed that relationship; whose voices should be recorded in the imperial archive; and, ultimately, the fate of the enslaved, soon to be emancipated throughout the empire.

When the Commission of Eastern Inquiry tried to investigate sensational allegations that the former Governor of Mauritius, Robert Farquhar, had actively collaborated in and profited from the thriving slave trade (1826–29), it demonstrated the limits of crown commissions as information gatherers and incubators of reform. This chapter shows how every layer of Mauritian society (with the notable exception of a few disgruntled officials and Liberated Africans) worked to thwart investigation, not only into the slave trade but also into other key objects of inquiry. In the process, the Mauritius inquiry demonstrates how much the success of conservative reform relied on buy-in from and compromise with colonial publics. The centrality of the commissioners’ role in binding new publics to empire, and the consequences of its failure, are abundantly clear.