The failure of the geographical empire of faith to fit any map of British colonies, mandates, and protectorates posed an obvious difficulty for me as editor of this volume. Casting the geographical net too wide would locate the book among histories of the expansion of Christianity and risk losing sight of Empire altogether. Setting the bounds too narrowly, for example at the boundaries of formal Empire, would omit important chapters in the story, such as David Livingstone’s journeys of discovery and the struggle between French Catholics and British Protestants for state support in Tahiti, Madagascar, and New Caledonia. The ultimate decision was made to concentrate attention on all regions that at one time or another belonged to, or might well have become part of, the formal Empire. As a result Christian missions to South Asia fall within the purview of the volume, while the greater part of China—the great hope of European and North American evangelists from 1860 to 1950—is omitted. Within this broad rubric the margins have been deliberately left fuzzy.
A related question was whether the volume itself should be organized by geographical region, with one chapter on the South Pacific, another on India, a third on North America, and so on. The benefits of a regional organization were considerable. Most historians ground their expertise in a single country or region, so it would be easier to attract collaborators. On the other hand, it seemed equally apparent that a regional approach would involve a good deal of duplication. The most important themes to have emerged from recent work on the history of missions and Empire would have to be repeated for each region—the role of indigenous evangelists, language, gender, the creation of ethnicity, and tensions between missions and government. Similar problems would have arisen from a chronological framework. In the end a desire to emphasize the emerging themes won out over geography and chronology. This placed additional burdens on the individual authors. While concentrating on what they know best, each of them had to stretch to encompass a wider world. That said, regional and chronological biases creep in as a matter of course. The book needed a starting point, which Chapter 2, by Eliga Gould, establishes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For most of this period the Asian and African territorial Empire was very small; most religious work outside the British Isles took place in North America and the West Indies so there is a definite tilt in the direction of a particular time and place. Explaining how the work of mission changed from supplying the religious needs of new colonies in the eighteenth century to plans for ‘the conversion of the world in this generation’ in the early twentieth century requires a close look at the emergence of evangelical Christianity in the eighteenth century and the organization of mission societies in the nineteenth century. With the United States lost to the Empire in the American Revolution, this story centres on developments in the British Isles and Europe, thus giving Andrew Porter’s delineation of trends in British missions in Chapter 3 both a regional and a chronological focus.
It was commonplace for nineteenth-century missionaries to point to the growth of the British Empire as specifically intended by Divine Providence as an instrument for the conversion of the world to Christianity, just as promoters of Empire spoke of missions as partners in the work of spreading commerce and civilization. For all the talk of partnership the relationship between missionaries and other agents of empire was never easy. Keith Hancock’s great Survey of Commonwealth Affairs (1937-42) conceptualized the expansion of Empire as a series of overlapping frontiers: the traders’ frontier, the settlers’ frontier, the missionaries’ frontier, and the officials’ frontier. Hancock could see better than most the way that missionaries were practically forced to assume the role of moral guardians. They were seldom popular with officials and traders and generally in conflict with white settlers. In South Africa the missionary frontier collided spectacularly with the settlers’ frontier: on one side ‘the ideals of humane individuals working for the protection of the weak’ and, on the other, ‘the will of a racial group which has found its unity in the determination to survive, to possess, and to dominate.’ Although the worlds of missionaries, officials, traders, and settlers were not as separate as Hancock’s schema would seem to imply—many former missionaries and children of missionaries became settlers and occupied important positions in colonial bureaucracies—there were many spectacular collisions between missionaries and government. Chapter 4, by Alan Lester, examines the success of missions and mission-linked philanthropic societies in imperial politics following the abolition of slavery and the gradual decline from that high point of influence.
The most important late twentieth-century scholarly insight into the growth of Christianity in the British Empire was that European missionaries accomplished very little in the way of conversion. The greatest difficulty faced by those who have tried to argue that Christian missions were a form of cultural imperialism has been the overwhelming evidence that the agents of conversion were local people, not foreign missionaries. None of them were coerced into believing and very few were paid. For example, during the entire nineteenth century in the Travancore state of southern India the London Missionary Society employed a total of fifty European missionaries, compared to many times that number of so-called ‘native agents’. In 1900 there were 882 of these agents—pastors, readers, schoolmasters, etc. In addition to these formal operatives, Christian beliefs were spread by ordinary people, whose numbers grew as colonial development increased mobility. Unfortunately their experience remains largely undocumented in the mountains of paper generated by European and American missions. Indeed, the balance of documentation is usually inversely proportionate to the actual numbers. A very recent biographical dictionary of Christian missions lists 2,400 individuals, only 258 of whom are ‘non-western persons’ from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands. Voices of white missionaries predominate in mission publications and archives for understandable, if regrettable, reasons. As voluntary societies, mission organizations faced constant pressures to raise money. Individual missionaries had to justify their lonely underpaid existences by writing regular reports. Pressures of fund-raising and accountability generated streams of written reports aimed at pricking the consciences of contributors, celebrating conversions, and explaining failures. Missionary martyrs and heroes like Bishop Patteson and David Livingstone provided riveting reading for pious audiences at home. Descriptions of the ‘hardhearted, sinful, slothful heathen’ helped European missionaries account for their slow progress in winning converts. As Natasha Erlank observes, historians who only study printed texts run the risks of underestimating the complexity and particularity of the individual missionary experience and missing the voice of the indigenous evangelist altogether.
The phenomenon of local people carrying Christianity far ahead of advancing imperial frontiers first appeared in the southern Pacific in the nineteenth century, which explains the regional and chronological weighting of Chapter 5, by John Barker. The areas that proved most resistant to Christian evangelizing whether by European or by indigenous agents were regions dominated by well-entrenched universalizing creeds and sacred written texts. Outside the Empire this was best demonstrated in China and Japan. Within the formal Empire, resistance was stiffest in South Asia, where the appearance of missionaries produced a backlash of religious revitalization among Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. Where such competing religions were deeply rooted among large populations, as in Burma, Ceylon, and the sub-Saharan Sudanic regions, imperial authority did little to advance the cause of Christian missions. In fact, as Robert Frykenberg points out in Chapter 6, the British Raj assumed the role of protector of Hindu religious establishments. That did not mean, however, that Christianity made no headway. As in other areas of the Empire, people marginalized by social class and geography proved to be exceptionally susceptible to the power of the new religion. Local lay evangelists opened the way for overseas missionaries to establish schools, printing presses, and hospitals.
One of the greatest drawbacks to the study of the people most responsible for the spread of Christianity is the relative paucity of texts in their own words that describe their motivations and attitudes to political and economic change. Chapter 7, by Peggy Brock, tries to redress the balance by closely examining some of the rare texts, published and unpublished, produced by ‘new Christians’ who engaged in formal and informal missionary work. In Chapter 8 a literary scholar, Gareth Griffiths, tries to penetrate the stylized formal recounting of conversion in published texts in an effort to hear individual indigenous voices.
Many aspects of the imperial experience would have been very different in the absence of the missionary movement. Outside the colonies of white settlement European women played a minor role in the imperial enterprise. Very few gained official posts, and almost none worked in the military services, trade, or commerce. For a long time fears of disease deterred British officials from taking their wives to the tropics. In contrast, women were omnipresent in Christian missions. After some early experiments in sending unmarried men resulted in sexual scandals, most Protestant missionary societies insisted on employing only married men. This produced the extraordinary spectacle of would-be missionaries on whirlwind speaking tours in a frantic search for suitable partners before they were due to sail for their foreign posting. Training institutions like Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts sprang up for the specific purpose of educating appropriate missionary wives. Once in the field, missionaries and their wives were expected to act as exemplars of monogamous, pious, Christian family life. By the middle of the nineteenth century single women began to find employment as teachers in mission schools. Though the Catholic Church had no place for married priests, female religious orders put women to work in schools and orphanages throughout the Empire. While every chapter in this volume touches on questions of gender in one way or another, Chapter 9, by Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock, is entirely devoted to the subject of women as agents and converts of missions.
A frequent complaint of white settlers and traders in many places was that missionaries gave their converts too much book-learning, making them unfit for menial labour. Most missions refused to give ground on the issue because, especially for Protestants, the chief accomplishment of the Reformation had been to put the Bible in the hands of ordinary people. Because the ability to read and interpret Scripture was central to the faith, teaching converts to read the Bible was a top priority. Several consequences flowed from this commitment. The West African theologian Lamin Sanneh has emphasized the centrality of translation to the Christian religion. Key concepts of the faith had to be conveyed in many different languages to a multitude of cultures; otherwise Christianity would never have spread beyond Palestine. Missionaries of all denominations, Catholic as well as Protestant, expected their clergy to have a working knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin when they set about translating the Bible into other languages. In Chapter 10, on missions and language, Paul Landau explores some of the momentous consequences of the translation exercise. While utilitarian theorists argued strenuously for English as the language of education in British colonies, missionaries were unwilling to put the educational cart before the evangelistic horse. It would be easier to get their sacred texts into the hands of their converts by translating them into indigenous languages. Once in possession of sound translations, local evangelists could communicate ‘the good news’ in the familiar dialects of their fellow countrymen. Making Bibles in new languages required the compilation of vocabularies and translations on a truly heroic scale. Had there been no missions in the Empire, who knows how many languages might have become extinct? Martin Luther is generally credited with standardizing the German language through his translation of the Bible. By the nineteenth century language had become central to German concepts of national identity. Language proved equally important to the emergence of new identities among colonized peoples.
Shakespeare’s Caliban complained to Prospero that ‘You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse’. Missionaries could hardly have anticipated all the ways that their translations would be employed, especially in opposition to themselves and imperial rule. Literate converts founded newspapers and used them to communicate commercial and political information. Some were surprised to learn while reading the Old Testament in their own language that King Solomon the wise had numerous wives and concubines, while missionaries insisted on monogamy. Applying their own interpretative powers to the book of Revelation and prophetic books of the Bible, some concluded that Christ would shortly return in Glory to strike down wicked rulers. As Christianity took on a local character, new heresies opposed mission orthodoxies, and indigenous prophets denounced the oppression of settlers and imperial authorities. Chapter 11, by Robert Edgar, demonstrates some of the many ways in which Christianity could be turned against ecclesiastical and secular authority by independent-minded preachers. While some missionaries denounced these innovations as heresies or ‘a return to paganism’, others attempted to understand the cultural lenses through which non-European societies viewed the world. Translation necessarily involved understanding other cultures. It is therefore not surprising, as Patrick Harries demonstrates in Chapter 12, that missionaries were often in the vanguard of what became known as the discipline of anthropology—sometimes called the scholarly handmaiden of Empire. Missionaries included voluminous ethnographic detail in their reports of Pacific Island and African societies. Henry Callaway collected Zulu nursery tales and legends, which were eagerly seized as precious raw material by armchair anthropologists in late Victorian England. Susan Bayly recounts in volume III of the Oxford History of the British Empire how missionary attempts to refute the errors of Hinduism through translations of Indian sacred texts had the ironic consequence of making those very texts more available than ever before to South Asian people. Those same translations made fundamental contributions to European theories of language, race, and culture. When Edwin Smith, the Methodist missionary and future President of the Royal Anthropological Society, became a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1900, he was one of eleven clergy on the membership list. Only gradually did a rupture develop between missions and ‘professional’ anthropology.
The Empire may have been indifferent to the linguistic and anthropological work of the missions, but it could hardly have done without their assistance in the fields of education and medicine, subjects taken up in Chapter 13 by Norman Etherington. Lord Hailey’s African Survey of 1938 remarked that until very recently ‘nine-tenths of the education in Africa was in the hands of missionary bodies’. The same was largely true for most other parts of the tropical Empire and for indigenous people trapped within white settler societies. The predominance of mission schools distinguished the British on the one hand from the French Empire, where a strong anticlerical tradition permeated the Third Republic, and the Portuguese Empire on the other hand, where a Papal Concordat of 1940 gave Catholic missions a virtual monopoly of education. Missions founded schools for their evangelical purposes: to train local people as ministers and missionaries; to spread literacy so the Bible could be read; and to form the minds of children when adults proved indifferent or hostile to the Christian message. As the example of missions to independent island societies of the South Pacific and the ‘tribal’ regions of India demonstrate, missions would have built schools without government assistance. However, when imperial grants became available, cash-strapped missionaries grabbed them. Unlike the United States, whose founding charter insisted on the separation of Church and State, the British constitution enshrined their union. Public education in the British Isles had developed in the first instance through the provision of grants-in-aid to church schools, so it seemed natural to apply the same system in the colonies. However welcome the funding, missions soon found that assistance bred dependence and a large measure of government regulation. Throughout the Empire, but especially in the colonies of white settlement, there was relentless government hostility to ‘literary education’ and a demand for ‘practical’ vocational training. Since race-conscious white settlers had no desire to create competitors for skilled jobs, the cry for practical education was in truth a demand that the missions train people for menial jobs and domestic service. While the missions could not cave in to such demands without betraying their converts, neither could they ignore the threat that government funds might be suddenly withdrawn. The tension remained constant, sometimes surviving decolonization. Some of the worst abuses of mission education occurred in boarding schools. Begun as a means for removing children from the ‘baneful influence of heathenism’, they were endorsed as ‘the most effective method of training’ by the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies in 1925. However, when linked to government funding, they could be turned to less worthy uses, as in Australia, where racist policies aimed to remove children of mixed descent from their Aboriginal mothers. The so-called ‘stolen children’ were picked up by police and dropped at mission boarding schools; in most cases they never saw their mothers again.
Government assistance to medical missions was less controversial. Unlike schools, medical work was an optional extra for most mission societies, who accepted sickness, death, and miraculous cures as part of the Providential ordering of the cosmos. Medical missions were mainly supported as a holy imitation of Christ the healer and as bait for their preaching. Before the Second World War, British governments did not regard the provision of medical services as a necessary service to their tropical subjects. Aside from mission hospitals, medical services concentrated on maintaining the health of white functionaries and certain classes of native employees, especially mineworkers. When government and mission medical services did begin to converge in the post-war period, decolonization was already under way, a process that is the subject of Chapter 14, by David Maxwell. It first appeared that missions might disappear along with imperial authority. Leaders of independence movements who had been less than impressed with mission support for their cause not only cut government funding but nationalized mission schools and other facilities. After the period covered by this volume, local clergy, who were by now mostly leaders of independent national churches, called for a ‘Moratorium on Mission’ in the 1970s. It soon became evident, however, that the end of Empire did not mean the end of Christianity or even the foreign missionary presence. African clergy who broke their links with mission societies during the colonial era made it plain that their quarrel was not with Christianity but with patterns of authority that denied them an equal place in mission councils. In the post-independence period, congregations continued to swell, particularly among the Pentecostal churches, which paid little attention to politics. American fundamentalist Protestant missionaries arrived in large numbers, preaching uncompromising born-again Christianity—to the consternation of liberal churchmen who had bent over backwards to avoid offending cultural sensitivities. Eventually, sheer financial necessity caused many newly independent nations to reconsider their early opposition to mission schools. Non-governmental organizations, many of which had historic ties to Christianity, carried on many of the welfare functions previously performed by missions—including human rights advocacy that echoed the old humanitarian crusades of Exeter Hall.