The British Protestant missionary movement was as diverse in its implementation as it was ambiguous in its effects.
Missionaries were men and women who sought to build God’s kingdom but invariably had to contend with Britain’s empire. Just as Britain’s imperial presence varied from region to region, so too was the British missionary movement inherently shaped by the unique peoples and places who were the subjects of their conversionary work.
In providing an introduction to British missions in the high imperial era, it is a goal of this chapter to offer a sample of the diverse contexts in which British missionaries worked in order to raise critical issues relevant to the history of European imperialism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. It does so by briefly examining British Protestant missionary activity in three different contexts: Nigeria, India and China. Broad thematic elements will be discussed in relation to the history of British missions in each area: commercial factors with respect to Nigeria, the evangelical holiness spirituality of the Keswick Convention with respect to China and education with respect to India. The story of Christian missions is incomplete without giving attention to the African and Asian peoples who converted to Christianity, and their agency is acknowledged in each section. These snapshots of the missionary encounters during this period are not intended to be exhaustive or conclusive, but rather to highlight salient points for debate and further enquiry.Even when remarks are confined to British Protestant missions, one finds that missionaries are difficult people to discuss in general terms. Even in their own time, missionaries were subject to widely varying appraisals. Pilloried by Sydney Smith as ‘little detachments of lunatics’ and caricatured by Charles Dickens as bumbling ‘telescopic philanthropists’, British missionaries and their supporters have met with a wide range of criticism, particularly in the wake of national independence movements in the midtwentieth century.1 Other figures, such as David Livingstone in the 1850s and 1870s, or the Cambridge Seven for a briefer time in the mid-1880s, met with popular acclaim, even fanfare.
Missionaries were complex people who came from a variety of social, educational, professional and Christian denominational backgrounds and worked in widely different political, cultural and economic contexts. Even limiting the discussion to those missionaries who were British in national origin, we still find a considerably wide spectrum of theological convictions, disposition to non-Westerners and regard for proximate imperial powers. It is not difficult to find exceptions to general assumptions about missionaries. For the missionaries who vociferously supported British imperial expansionism, there were others, including those who joined the China Inland Mission, who sought to remove traces of their identification with European powers. Though they believed that the message they preached had universal purchase, missionaries likewise often bore racialist (if not racist) presuppositions about the superiority of Western civilisation. Though perhaps less extreme in some cases than their contemporaries, these dispositions nevertheless posed obstacles to the ordination of indigenous clergy and the formation of independent Christian communities.The internal diversity of British missionaries combined with the contextual diversity of where they worked as missionaries also means there were variations in how their message was heard by their non-Western listeners—and certainly differences in how converts appropriated what they heard. Despite similarities that may have existed among missionaries from the same Christian denomination or missionary society, vastly different contexts could produce significantly distinct dispositions to other races, religions and cultures. Similarly, even among particular missionary societies one can see diachronic shifts in their disposition to imperial political power over the course of the nineteenth century; such as happened with British Congregationalists with respect to their support of the South African War (1899-1902).2
Given these qualifications, what meaningful generalisations can be made about this diverse and variable—even nebulous—movement that extended within and beyond the British Empire? Furthermore, what does the study of British missionaries and missions have to contribute to the study of the British Empire?
The missionary encounter is an important historical component of Britain’s larger encounters with the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because it was often through missionaries that European ideas, education, religion, medicine, technology and even politics were mediated.
It was not uncommon for the mission station to be equipped with a school, a dispensary, a camera, a gun and many other markers of Western presence and identity. These stations were often the intimate spaces in which the asymmetrical relationships between European and non-European peoples, societies and cultures were contested.3 Missionaries were also important information brokers between the imperial periphery and metropole. Mission agencies in Britain feverishly published pamphlets and newsletters detailing the movements of the spirit overseas, while missionaries in foreign lands set up their own printing presses to publish local newspapers and books. These networks were important channels through which news from within (and beyond) the empire made its way to the British public, having significant implications for both domestic and imperial politics.4 Recent insightful analyses have brought out the complexity and ambiguity of some Victorian-era missionaries’ careers by examining their overlapping roles as explorers,5 ethnographers6 and orientalist scholars.7 Additionally, the study of women’s history in both North America and Britain has much to gain by examining the essential roles that women played in both organising and conducting missions overseas.8 Finally, the study of the history of the British missionary movement and the related study of the history of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America offers important insights into the ways in which Western ideas, religion and technologies were appropriated and resisted by non-Western peoples. These dynamics and exchanges can illuminate the agency of indigenous peoples, showing that ideas, spirituality and literature were engaged actively and not inherently imposed upon a passive people.These dimensions of the missionary movement have surfaced from corresponding methodological shifts in both the research and writing of the history of empire and the history of Christianity.
Historiographically, this influence has helped to move the study of Christian missions beyond its former hagiographical tendencies to more complex examinations of how the missionaries related in particular contexts to indigenous societies and forms of Western power.9 At the same time, scholars of Christianity such as Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls have helped to redefine the nature of historical enquiry into the history of Christianity in the non-Western world.10 Broadly speaking, Sanneh and Walls have argued that the focus of historical attention ought not be placed upon celebrated missionary heroes, but upon how people in the non-Western world responded to and appropriated Christianity. The rich variety of expressions of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America, many of which emerged in the high imperial era and have since grown at remarkable rates in the course of the twentieth century, gives the historical relationship between European religion, European imperialism and its appropriation by non-Europeans a contemporary salience.It is not just scholars of missionary history who have discovered imperial history; historians of empire have produced erudite and influential works that address the relationship between British Protestant missions and the British Empire. The focus of major works by Catherine Hall and Susan Thorne has been upon missionaries’ mediation of the metropole and the periphery.11 In Hall’s estimation, missionaries were ‘imbricated’ with empire. In Civilising Subjects, Hall traces the shifts in British Baptists’ disposition to those of West African descent from the time of emancipation to the 1857 Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica. She gives particular attention to the ossification of racial discourse that accompanied increased doubts as to the capacity for Jamaicans to govern themselves according to the standards of British civilisation. Key to this shift, argues Hall, was missionaries’ rhetoric that was purveyed back to the metropole and distributed in missionary newsletters, creating a spiritual network that helped to calcify racist and patriarchal imperial discourse among Baptists.
Susan Thorne similarly works with the reciprocal effects of missionary expansion upon English notions of race and class in the nineteenth century. Thorne examines how the English working class became conscripted into the missionary movement, which she described as patronising, divisive and bourgeois.12 Thorne suggests that Sunday schools, literature campaigns and magic lantern presentations utilised missionary discourses about the ‘Other’ and engaged all English social classes into a benevolently imperialistic mission that ultimately divided the global working class.13 Central to Hall’s and Thorne’s analyses is missionaries’ imperialistic and racialist discourse. They judge missionaries, as a result, to have been among the most insidious of imperialists. Though Thorne states that missionaries never developed a ‘unilateral disposition to empire’, they nevertheless gave ‘one of the most powerful rationales imaginable in Victorian imperial culture’ through their empathising with colonised subjects and their ‘universal identification with the British nation’s imperial destiny’.14 Other studies, by contrast, have attempted to parse the variations between missionaries’ rhetoric, theological self-understanding and actual responses to particular imperial contexts.Responding to Hall and Thorne, Andrew Porter argues in his 2004 work, Religion versus Empire? that one finds complicated, occasional and variable relationships between British imperial aims and missionaries’ activities.15 For missionaries, the project of the evangelisation of the world and the project of empire were never simply coterminous. Each seemed to attempt to find ways to utilise the other for its own purposes, negotiating what one side viewed as the insidious or less desirable features of the other. While missionaries might have spoken out against imperial atrocities and endeavoured to temper violent imperial policies and practices, governments attempted to assuage the disruptive influence that missions often brought into communities.
Missionaries’ efforts to move beyond the borders of empire to evangelise sometimes resulted in the expansion of the British Empire, as was the case, to varying degrees, in the South Pacific.16 Porter’s work, along with Brian Stanley’s The Bible and the Flag, calls the historian’s attention to the importance of taking into account missionaries’ theological beliefs as to how their actions related to European imperialism.17 Missionaries, says Porter, were people who took their theology seriously, and therefore the historian who wishes to understand them likewise needs to take their theological beliefs into account.18 Both Porter and Stanley, while acknowledging complicity in imperial violence, also resist the tendency to view British missions as a comfortable handmaiden of British imperial expansion or subjugation. Thus, even in the period under examination in this chapter, in which British missions seemed closer in step with British imperial interests, one is hard pressed to identify a uniform disposition to the British Empire among British missionaries. Vast differences in contexts accounted for much of these variations across these otherwise similar groups of British expatriates, and it is to these contexts that we shall now turn.