Missionary Imperialists?

Missionary Imperialists?
Author: John H. Darch
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2009-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1606085964

Missionary Imperialists? examines the frontiers of empire in tropical Africa and the south-west Pacific in the Mid-Victorian era. Its central theme is the role played by British Protestant missionaries in imperial development and a continuous thread is the interaction between the missions and those in government, both London and in the colonies. An introductory chapter examines the main missionary societies involved in this study. This is followed by six detailed case studies, three from the south-west Pacific (the Pacific labor trade, Fiji, and New Guinea) and three from tropical Africa (the Gambia, Lagos and Yorubaland, and East Africa). The crucial importance of influential missionary supporters in Britain is noted as its missionary involvement in wider campaigning networks with other humanitarian groups. The book argues that where missionaries did aid imperial development it was largely incidental, an imperialism of result rather than an imperialism of intent to use the categories of Cain and Hopkins. It will be seen that although there were a few dedicated imperialists in the missionary ranks, and others gradually became convinced that the future of their particular mission and its people would be most secure under British jurisdiction, the majority had no such enthusiasm. Yet this did not mean that they had no effect on imperial development. Campaigns against both slavery and indentured labor inevitably raised the profile and influence of Europeans on the imperial frontier thus shifting a fragile balance in their direction. Most importantly, by their very presence on the frontiers of empire and as providers of education and European moral and spiritual values, missionaries became incidental and sometimes unintentional but nevertheless effective agents of imperialism.

Christian Imperialism

Christian Imperialism
Author: Emily Conroy-Krutz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2015-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501701037

In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part in the Protestant conversion of the entire world. Over the next several decades, these men and women were joined by hundreds more American missionaries at stations all over the globe. Emily Conroy-Krutz shows the surprising extent of the early missionary impulse and demonstrates that American evangelical Protestants of the early nineteenth century were motivated by Christian imperialism—an understanding of international relations that asserted the duty of supposedly Christian nations, such as the United States and Britain, to use their colonial and commercial power to spread Christianity. In describing how American missionaries interacted with a range of foreign locations (including India, Liberia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, North America, and Singapore) and imperial contexts, Christian Imperialism provides a new perspective on how Americans thought of their country’s role in the world. While in the early republican period many were engaged in territorial expansion in the west, missionary supporters looked east and across the seas toward Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Conroy-Krutz’s history of the mission movement reveals that strong Anglo-American and global connections persisted through the early republic. Considering Britain and its empire to be models for their work, the missionaries of the American Board attempted to convert the globe into the image of Anglo-American civilization.

Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860

Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860
Author: Anna Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2003-08-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521826993

Anna Johnston analyses missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnston argues that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, caught between imperial and religious interests. She maps out this position through an examination of texts published by missionaries of the largest, most influential nineteenth-century evangelical institution, the London Missionary Society. Texts from Indian, Polynesian, and Australian missions are examined to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relation to gender, colonialism, and race.

Scholars, Missionaries, and Counter-Imperialists

Scholars, Missionaries, and Counter-Imperialists
Author: Andrew C. Holman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2022-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000546373

For more than half a century, the field of Canadian Studies has attracted North American scholars of the highest caliber to examine Canada: its distinctive social makeup, its fascinating colonial and postcolonial history, its intriguing literature, its political structure, and its changing place in the world. Scholars, Missionaries, and Counter-Imperialists: The American Review of Canadian Studies, 1971–2021 traces the birth and growth of that field by reproducing 15 exemplary articles published in the pages of that journal from its establishment until the present day. For five decades, the American Review of Canadian Studies (ARCS) acted as a bellwether for the field, revealing its strengths, projecting new directions and inquiries, and reflecting the changing topics and methods that scholars used to study Canada. This book captures the history of that field in one robust volume. Carefully selected by the co-editors of ARCS, the chapters in this edited volume are prefaced by an introductory essay that assesses the accomplishments of the field and brief chapter introductions that place them into context.

Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire

Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire
Author: Matthew Leporati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009285181

A lively account of the Romantic-era revival of epic literature set against the background of British imperialism's evangelical turn.

In God's Empire

In God's Empire
Author: Owen White
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-09-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0195396448

A collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars in the field, In God's Empire examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France's secular "civilizing mission," it was more often than not religious workers who actually fulfilled the daily tasks of running schools, hospitals, and orphanages. While their work was often tied to small villages, missionaries' interactions had geopolitical implications. Focusing on many regions--from the Ottoman Empire and the United States to Indochina and the Pacific Ocean--this book explores how France used missionaries' long connections with local communities as a means of political influence and justification for colonial expansion. In God's Empire offers readers both an overview of the major historical dimensions of the French evangelical enterprise, as well as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological challenges of placing French missionary work within the context of European, colonial, and religious history.

A Missionary Nation

A Missionary Nation
Author: Scott Eastman
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496228308

A Missionary Nation focuses on Spain's crusade to resurrect its empire, beginning with the War of Africa.

American Evangelicals in Egypt

American Evangelicals in Egypt
Author: Heather J. Sharkey
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0691168105

In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global influence, their enterprise flourished during the next century. American Evangelicals in Egypt follows the ongoing and often unexpected transformations initiated by missionary activities between the mid-nineteenth century and 1967--when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War uprooted the Americans in Egypt. Heather Sharkey uses Arabic and English sources to shed light on the many facets of missionary encounters with Egyptians. These occurred through institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and through literacy programs and rural development projects that anticipated later efforts of NGOs. To Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians, missionaries presented new models for civic participation and for women's roles in collective worship and community life. At the same time, missionary efforts to convert Muslims and reform Copts stimulated new forms of Egyptian social activism and prompted nationalists to enact laws restricting missionary activities. Faced by Islamic strictures and customs regarding apostasy and conversion, and by expectations regarding the proper structure of Christian-Muslim relations, missionaries in Egypt set off debates about religious liberty that reverberate even today. Ultimately, the missionary experience in Egypt led to reconsiderations of mission policy and evangelism in ways that had long-term repercussions for the culture of American Protestantism.

Missions, Nationalism and the End of Empire

Missions, Nationalism and the End of Empire
Author: Stanley
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2003
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780802821164

Christian missions have often been seen as the religious arm of Western imperialism. What is rarely appreciated is the role they played in bringing about an end to the Western colonial empires after the Second World War. Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire explores this neglected subject. Respected authorities on the history of missions explore new territory in these chapters, examining from diverse angles the linkages between Christianity, nationalism, and the dissolution of the colonial empires in Asia and Africa. This work not only sheds light on the relation of religion and politics but also uncovers the sometimes paradoxical implications of the church's call to bring the gospel to all the world. Contributors: Daniel H. Bays Philip Boobbyer Judith M. Brown Richard Elphick Deborah Gaitskell Adrian Hastings Caroline Howell Ka- che Yip Ogbu U. Kalu Hartmut Lehmann Derek Peterson Andrew Porter Brian Stanley John Stuart

Missionary Diplomacy

Missionary Diplomacy
Author: Emily Conroy-Krutz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2024-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 150177400X

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.