Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century EnglandStanford University Press, 1999 - 247 pages This book explores the missionary movement's influence on popular perceptions of empire and race in nineteenth-century England. The foreign missionary endeavor was one of the most influential of the channels through which nineteenth-century Britons encountered the colonies, and because of their ties to organized religion, foreign missionary societies enjoyed more regular access to a popular audience than any other colonial lobby. Focusing on the influential denominational case of English Congregationalism, this study shows how the missionary movement's audience in Britain was inundated with propaganda designed to mobilize financial and political support for missionary operations abroad, propaganda in which the imperial context and colonized targets of missionary operations figured prominently. In her attention to the local social contexts in which missionary propaganda was disseminated, the author departs from the predominantly cultural thrust of recent studies of imperialism's popularization. She shows how Congregationalists made use of the language and institutional space provided by missions in their struggles to negotiate local relations of power. In the process, the missionary project was implicated in some of the most important developments in the social history of nineteenth-century Britain -- the popularization of organized religion and its subsequent decline, the emergence and evolution of a language of class, the gendered making of a middle class, and the strange death of British liberalism. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 47
... European History seminar at Cornell University ; David Feldman , Peter Mandlef , and Martin Daunton for the opportunity to address the So- cial History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London ; and ...
... European centers to appropriating if not supine peripheries . 10 Social historians have been particularly remiss in this regard . Until very recently most social histories of Britain in this period were written without significant ...
... Europe . ** 20 This book will argue that in fact the empire did " loom large " in the minds of many Britons . While it may at some future point be important to remind ourselves that imperial ambitions were not pursued or imperial iden ...
... European imperial monolith advanced . Not only did missionaries sometimes pay with their lives for their principled opposition to alternative modes of power , but colonized peoples themselves found opportunities for resistance as well ...
... European colonialists ' ranks.44 + How then can I justify the connection I make between missions and im- perialism — the connection on which this study is predicated ? In answer to this question , I will say first that , however ...
Contents
1 | |
The Birth of Modern Missions | 23 |
Missions | 53 |
From Telescopic Philanthropy to Social Missionary | 89 |
The Social Relations | 124 |
The Strange Death of Missionary Imperialism | 155 |
Notes | 173 |
Works Cited | 215 |
Index | 239 |
Other editions - View all
Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth ... Susan Thorne No preview available - 1999 |