Missionaries often saw themselves as an anomalous element in the Empire: striving to acquire authority over indigenous people on the one hand, while resisting aggressive colonial forces on the other. Apart from the anti-slavery movement, the most celebrated struggles between missions and secular forces were fought from the late 1820s to the mid-1840s, when missionaries and their allies posed their model of Christian, humanitarian imperialism as an alternative to the practices prevailing in the settler colonies. Three particularly fraught zones of conflict were the Cape Colony, New South Wales, and New Zealand. Although each of these distant, staggered episodes of conflict had its own local dynamics and outcomes, they were connected in debates staged by missionaries, humanitarians, and settlers. Each event was a battle in a broader ‘propaganda war’, fought out across trans-imperial networks of communication, incorporating such far-flung territories as the West Indies and India. At stake was the definition and determination of ‘proper’ relations between British colonists and their others.
While many missions blamed settlers for killing and dispossessing indigenous peoples, and also for impeding slave emancipation, evangelism, and ‘civilization’, settler communities sought material security and accumulation through a more forceful regulation of enslaved and indigenous peoples. Parliament’s Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) of 1836-7, initiated by Thomas Fowell Buxton, marshalled the testimony of missionaries spread through the colonies of settlement, and played a crucial role in situating Britain’s diverse overseas colonies within a common humanitarian narrative. This narrative challenged settlers by constructing their behaviour as immoral and threatening their access to government and public opinion in Britain. However, the ambitious ‘experiment’ in humanitarian colonial relations that the Aborigines Committee, with its missionary informants, helped to conduct, turned out to be brief. By the mid-nineteenth century many of its own proponents were disillusioned, while its antagonists had mobilized their own network of influence to win metropolitan support. Although the humanitarian rhetoric of the missionaries retained its potency in the later nineteenth century, and certain humanitarian institutions continued to cast a critical eye over colonial behaviour, they never again mounted a comparable trans-imperial political challenge to British settler practices.
Networks of communication were critical to the construction of the Christian humanitarian world-view that many missionaries shared. They underpinned the anti-slavery movement which linked the West Indies with the United States and Britain. Key agents in the West Indies had been Nonconformist missionaries—mostly Baptists and Wesleyans—for whom slavery represented the denial of full Christian personhood. The Baptist William Knibb described Jamaica in the 1820s as a place ‘where Satan reigns with awful power’ while the enslaved ‘sons of Africa’ formed ‘a pleasing contrast to the debauched white population’.
West Indian planters reciprocated in kind, charging that missionaries preaching to enslaved people provided them with ‘new claims for freedom’ that could be appropriated and turned against the ‘master subject’. Mission churches also ‘provided lines of communication which were crucial to the organization of resistance’, as manifested in the revolt in Jamaica in 1831. The capacity of enslaved people to revolt of their own initiative was often denied by planters, so they directed their rage at the missionaries for preaching insurrection. Missionaries constituted an even larger real political threat to planter interests through their broader trans atlantic networks. Many acted as informants for the evangelical anti-slavery campaigners associated with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect of activist evangelicals, including Granville Sharpe, Thomas Clarkson, James Stephen, and Zachary Macaulay. After helping to bring about the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the Sect developed an even more extensive web of evangelical connections. Concern over the progress of Christianization in the East Indies was galvanized by John Shore and Charles Grant, both East India Company officials. By the 1820s intermarriage among the Sect’s founding families and new recruits had produced a ‘second generation’ led by Thomas Fowell Buxton.
A director of the London Missionary Society (LMS), Buxton supported the Bible and Missionary societies and the prison reform advocated by his sister-in-law, the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry. In 1823 he succeeded Wilberforce as head of the campaign to abolish slavery in the British colonies. As Member of Parliament for Weymouth, he articulated a wide- ranging programme of reform: ‘How can I promote the welfare of others? In private, by... sparing on my own pleasure and expending on God’s service. In public, by attending to the Slave Trade, Slavery, Indian widows burning themselves, the completion of those objects which have made some advance, viz. Criminal Law, Prisons, and Police.’
In June 1825 the planters of Barbados lambasted the Methodist missionary William Shrewsbury for siding with insurrectionary slaves and because ‘he had actually corresponded with Mr. Buxton!’ With prompting and help from his sister Sarah Maria, his daughter Priscilla and his wife’s cousin Anna Gurney, Buxton corresponded with such far-flung missionaries as the Anglican minister Samuel Marsden in New South Wales, the Quaker missionary James Backhouse, who moved between various parts of Australia and the Pacific, and John Philip, Superintendent of the LMS at the Cape. In his own mind Buxton saw clear connections between the enslavement of African labour and indigenous peoples threatened by expanding British settlements in these places.
Great Britain has, in former times, countenanced evils of great magnitude,— slavery and the Slave Trade; but for these she has made some atonement... An evil remains very similar in character, and not altogether unfit to be compared with them in the amount of misery it produces. The oppression of the natives of barbarous countries is a practice which pleads no claim to indulgence.
With missionary assistance Buxton aimed to mobilize the heart of Empire against both forms of oppression.