The explosive expansion of Christianity in Africa and Asia during the last two centuries constitutes one of the most remarkable cultural transformations in the history of mankind. Because it coincided with the spread of European economic and political hegemony, it tends to be taken for granted as a reflex of imperialism. However, the precise connections between religion and Empire have yet to be fully delineated by historians. This book aims to make a contribution to the very small shelf of literature devoted to exploring those connections in a vast library of scholarship on the history of the Christian religion. Much work remains to be done.
Christian missions are also unfinished business for the Oxford History of the British Empire. Christian missions and missionaries are remarkable for their absence in the first five volumes. Only once do they occupy a whole chapter (volume V, Historiography, chapter 19). For the rest, extended discussion of the missionary role in Imperial history occurs only in Andrew Porter’s chapters on religion and trusteeship in volume III and Nicholas Owen’s chapter on critics of empire in volume IV. Missionaries briefly step onto centre stage in chapters on West Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the West Indies, but otherwise receive brief generic references (e.g. ‘British missionaries as well as British businessmen required protection’ (IV, p. 42); ‘the most visible group among the British in China was one that many Consuls tended to regard as a nuisance: the missionaries’ (III, p. 158)). The marginal status of missions in volumes I to V contrasts markedly with the iconic importance accorded to the missionary in popular literature on Empire. J. A. Hobson memorably summarized the supposed sequence of imperial progress: ‘first the missionary, then the Consul, and at last the invading army’. The same aphorism appears in many guises without attribution: ‘first the missionary, then the trader, then the gunboat’; ‘first comes the Missionary, then comes the Resident, lastly comes the Regiment’. A variation conveying much the same assumption about the relationship between evangelization and imperial expansion has often been quoted by spokesmen for anti-colonial nationalisms: ‘First they had the Bible and we had the land; now we have the Bible and they have the land.’ One reason that historians distrust such easy generalizations is that rarely, if ever, do they accord with the record of British colonization. Plantation owners in the West Indies and officials of the East India Company put up stubborn resistance to missionaries seeking admission to lands already under imperial control. Colonial administrators barred Christian missionaries from parts of Nigeria and Sudan. Elsewhere missionaries worked for decades in lands that never came under imperial control. They pointedly resisted colonization schemes for New Zealand, South Africa, Malawi, and other regions.
The whole relationship between Christian missions and the Empire is problematic. For historians of religion, missions in the era of European imperialism constitute only a small chapter in a 2,000-year-old narrative of the expansion of Christianity—a story that is much more than a British or even a European enterprise. Christianity originated in Palestine and spread through the Middle East and North Africa before it reached Scandinavia and eastern Europe. The religion flourished in Tunisia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and south India before there was a British Empire. And despite predictions that ‘the white man’s religion’ would decline when the hand of imperial protection was removed, evangelization prospered as never before. The number of professing Christians in countries formerly under the British flag has multiplied many times since decolonization. Today significant numbers of African, East Asian, and South Asian Christian missionaries are at work in Europe and North America. Confounding the prediction that Islam would outrun Christianity in twentieth-century Africa, the Christian population of the continent grew from some 9 million in 1900 to 117 million in 1970 and 335 million in 2000—a transition that has been called ‘one of the most extraordinary phenomena of human history’. Andrew Walls points out that ‘in the course of the twentieth century, Christianity has become a mainly non-Western religion’.
Just as the history of the British Empire can be written without much attention to missions, the history of missions can be written without much attention to the Empire. The index of a book entitled Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century contains five references to imperialism, two references to Britain, and none to colonialism; in contrast, communism and communists get eleven references, along with thirteen to the United States. This underlines the important point that the story of missions in the Empire is not simply the story of British missions. Many British missionaries worked outside the Empire, and many of the missions that worked inside the Empire were not British. Continental European and North American missionaries predominated in parts of many British colonies. Nor were the British ever in the vanguard of missionary work. Catholic missions accompanied the expansion of Spain and Portugal in the early modern period; in the eighteenth century European Pietists launched missions to the most distant corners of the globe long before missionary societies began sprouting in Britain in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. And when British societies did appear, most of their first agents were drawn from other countries. From its foundation to 1830 forty-nine of the Church Missionary Society’s agents came from continental Europe. In the twentieth century American missionaries far outdistanced Protestant British counterparts, and Roman Catholic missions enjoyed a resurgence that eventually eclipsed the celebrated achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All things considered, the trajectories of missions and Empire hardly bear comparison. The expansion of Christianity pre-dated the British Empire by a very long time and entered a period of explosive growth after most of the imperial enterprise had been wound up. By the same token, a map of worldwide missionary activity—even British missionary activity—does not resemble the map of formal Empire in any era.
These plain facts largely explain why missions so seldom figure in the Oxford History of the British Empire. Why then call missions unfinished business? One reason is that, although missions and the official Empire were quite different operations, they play related parts in a larger drama—the spread of modernization, globalization, and Western cultural hegemony.
Another reason is that, when they are considered on a micro level, they often appear to enact or mimic the operations of political and economic imperialism at the macro level. Clifton Crais sees the mission station as ‘a colonialist institution par excellence that ‘communicated many of the essential ingredients of British rule and the capitalist world economy’. Scholars outside the world of religious and historical studies were recently introduced to this view of missions by a massive and influential study of London Missionary Society work among the Tswana people of southern Africa: Of Revelation and Revolution by the anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff. While historians generally welcomed the Comaroffs’ work with lukewarm enthusiasm, anthropologists, literary scholars, and post-colonial theorists hailed the book as a revelation. Leon de Kock probably correctly identified the reason for these divergent responses by pointing to historians’ valorization of archival texts over ritual and performance. The Comaroffs view the London Missionary Society’s stations as ‘performing civilization, in the hope of educating the Tswana to adopt Western cultural practices through the power of display.’ In many cases a strong case can be made for the mission station as a microcosm or trope of Empire. Like the explorer, the missionary arrived in regions barely touched by Western influences, preaching the superiority of Western religion, technology, and cultural practices. After a period of resistance, people began to adopt the new ways. Perversely, missionaries resisted the attempts of their converts to assume an equal social and clerical status in the Church until, in an act of spiritual decolonization, mission churches broke free from foreign control. Without denying that just such a sequence of events occurred in many mission fields, one of the aims of this volume is to show why a simple analogy with formal imperialism is misleading and to demonstrate the complexity of the evolving relationship between missions and the Empire.