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.

Contributes simultaneously to both British imperial and Indian history. This work demonstrates that missionary understandings and interactions with India, rather than being party to imperial ideologies, often diverged from metropolitan and imperial norms.

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.

Many missionary societies established mission schools in the nineteenth century in the British Empire as a means to convert non-Europeans to Christianity. Although the details, differed in various colonial contexts, the driving ideology behind mission schools was that Christian morality was highest form of civilisation needed for non-Europeans to be useful members of colonies under British rule. This comprehensive survey of multi-colonial sites over the long time span clearly describes the missionary paradox that to draw in pupils they needed to provide secular education, but that secular education was seen to lead both to a moral crisis and to anti-British sentiments.

The first Protestant mission was established in New Zealand in 1814, initiating complex political, cultural, and economic entanglements with Māori. Tony Ballantyne shows how interest in missionary Christianity among influential Māori chiefs had far-reaching consequences for both groups. Deftly reconstructing cross-cultural translations and struggles over such concepts and practices as civilization, work, time and space, and gender, he identifies the physical body as the most contentious site of cultural engagement, with Māori and missionaries struggling over hygiene, tattooing, clothing, and sexual morality. Entanglements of Empire is particularly concerned with how, as a result of their encounters in the classroom, chapel, kitchen, and farmyard, Māori and the English mutually influenced each other’s worldviews. Concluding in 1840 with New Zealand’s formal colonization, this book offers an important contribution to debates over religion and empire.

This book investigates the uses of crusader medievalism – the memory of the crusades and crusading rhetoric and imagery – in Britain, from Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825) to the end of the Second World War. It seeks to understand why and when the crusades and crusading were popular, how they fitted with other cultural trends of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, how their use was affected by the turmoil of the First World War and whether they were differently employed in the interwar years and in the 1939-45 conflict. Building on existing studies and contributing the fruits of fresh research, it brings together examples of the uses of the crusades from disparate contexts and integrates them into the story of the rise and fall crusader medievalism in Britain.

Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young ’native’ children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India, experimental British ventures for placing young children of the poor in infant schools were simultaneously transported to and adopted for all three colonies. From the 1820s to the 1850s, this transplantation of Britain’s infant schools to its distant colonies was deemed a radical and enlightened tool that was meant to hasten the conversion of 'heathen' peoples by missionaries to Christianity and to European modes of civilization. The intertwined legacies of European exploration, enlightenment ideals, education, and empire building, the authors argue, provided a springboard for British colonial and missionary activity across the globe during the nineteenth century. Informed by archival research and focused on the shared as well as unique aspects of the infant schools’ colonial experience, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods illuminates both the pervasiveness of missionary education and the diverse contexts in which its attendant ideals were applied.