This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Church of England chaplains and colonial parishes had followed English trade and settlement outward since the seventeenth century, but the church itself created no bishops for its colonies for generations, leaving Anglicans overseas without confirmation or ordination unless they crossed the Atlantic to receive it. Charles Inglis broke that gap. A Loyalist whose New York church had been burned during the American Revolution, he was consecrated at Lambeth Palace on 12 August 1787 as the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia and its dependencies, the British Empire's own first colonial bishopric.
Once that precedent existed, dioceses multiplied quickly. Through the nineteenth century new sees were created across British India, Africa, Australia and the Pacific, each colonial church gaining the bishops it had previously lacked and, with them, a settled institutional identity of its own. By 1867 the communion of national and colonial churches this growth had produced was substantial enough that the Archbishop of Canterbury convened seventy six bishops from across the world at Lambeth Palace for the first Lambeth Conference.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the transformation of a single national established church into a worldwide communion of self governing sister churches, joined by shared origin and by regular conference rather than by any single legal authority over them all. The 1867 Lambeth Conference marked the moment these scattered colonial dioceses began to recognise themselves as one connected family rather than as outposts of Canterbury alone.