Abstract
There have so far been few overt signs of intersection or overlap between the long-standing field of mission studies and the relatively new field of transnational studies. Missiology, the study of the theory and practice of Christian mission, is strongly informed by theology and has developed as a discipline at some remove from broader studies of mission history and of the relationship between missions, state and empire.1 For historians seeking to move beyond the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘national’ histories, missions are likely to be problematic entities because of the perceived closeness of their links with the nation-state and with empire. As a result, they may be overlooked.2 That missionaries possessed nationalistic and imperialistic longings there can be no doubt; recent mission scholarship, especially of the ‘high imperial’ period from 1880 to 1914, makes this plain.3 But such longings were in the main untypical. In the longer term, as the historian of British Protestant missions and empire Andrew Porter has recently argued, Christian mission’s theological emphasis made it not only a solvent of imperial authority but also a stimulus to ‘anti-imperialism’, religious and secular.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
N. Etherington, ‘Introduction’, in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005), pp. 1–18
D. J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, 1991).
As in A. Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham, 2003).
A. Porter (ed.), The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2003).
A. Porter, Religion versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004).
J. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, 2002)
A. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–60 (Cambridge, 2003).
N. Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003), pp. 122–3.
A. Porter, ‘Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 20(3) (1992), p. 372.
A. Richards, ‘Mission and Polity’, Political Theology, 4 (2001), pp. 11–12.
J. Hearn, ‘The “Invisible” NGO: US Evangelical Missions in Kenya’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 32(1) (2002), pp. 37–8.
A. Bebbington, ‘NGOs and Uneven Development: Geographies of Development Intervention’, Progress in Human Geography, 28(6) (2004), pp. 733–7.
K. Bediako, ‘Africa and Christianity on the Threshold of the Third Millennium: The Religious Dimension’, African Affairs, 99(395) (2000), pp. 306–8.
P. Gifford, ‘Some Recent Developments in African Christianity’, African Affairs, 93(373) (1994), p. 517.
G. Ter Haar, Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe (Cardiff, 1998).
A. Portes et al, ‘The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(2) (1999), pp. 219–23.
A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997).
A. Hastings, ‘The Clash of Nationalism and Universalism within Twentieth Century Mission Christianity’, in B. Stanley (ed.), Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2003), pp. 15–33.
K. Ward, ‘Introduction’, in Ward and B. Stanley (eds), The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999 (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2000), p. 7.
A.G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), pp. 226–7
A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002).
K. Clements, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J.H. Oldham (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 185–250.
N. Owen, ‘Critics of Empire’, in J. Brown and W.R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, Vol. IV (Oxford, 1999), pp. 188–211.
F. Füredi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (London, 1998), pp. 37–41.
K. Grant, ‘Trust and Self-Determination: Anglo-American Ethics of Empire and International Government’, in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds), Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges, 1800 to the Present Day (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 151–73.
P. Jenkins, ‘The Church Missionary Society and the Basel Mission: An Early Experiment in Inter-European Cooperation’, in Ward and Stanley (eds), The Church Mission Society, pp. 43–65.
R. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (London, 1975), pp. 91–235.
W.R. Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations: A History of the International Missionary Council and its Nineteenth Century Background (New York, 1952), pp. 15–97.
W.R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, 1987), pp. 91–124.
J.G. Greenlee and C.M. Johnston, Good Citizens: British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 (Montreal, 1999).
S. Maughan, ‘Imperial Christianity?: Bishop Montgomery and the Foreign Missions of the Church of England, 1895–1915’, in Porter (ed.), Imperial Horizons, pp. 32–57.
B. Stanley, ‘Church, State and the Hierarchy of “Civilization”: The Making of the “Missions and Governments” Report at the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910’, in Porter (ed.), Imperial Horizons, pp. 80–2.
K. Grant, A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York and Abingdon, 2005), esp. pp. 39–78, 135–66.
J.C. Thomson, Jr, P.W. Stanley, J.C. Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York, 1981), pp. 37–41.
M. Gannon, ‘The Basle Mission Trading Company and British Colonial Policy in the Gold Coast, 1918–28’, Journal of African History, 24(4) (1983), pp. 503–15
N. Söderblom, ‘Christian Missions and National Politics’, International Review of Missions (IRM), 8(32) (1919), p. 498.
M.L. Pirouet, ‘East African Christians and World War I’, Journal of African History, 19(1) (1978), pp. 117–30.
J.H. Oldham, ‘Co-operation: Its Necessity and Cost’, IRM, 8(30) (1919), p. 5
J.W. Cell (ed.), By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J.H. Oldham, 1918–26 (Chicago and London, 1976).
J.H. Oldham, ‘A New Beginning of International Missionary Co-operation’, IRM, 9(36) (1920), pp. 481–94.
J.H. Oldham, ‘Nationality and Missions’, IRM, 9(35) (1920), p. 381.
G.A. Oddie, Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms, 1850–1900 (New Delhi, 1979).
H.R. Weber, Asia and the Ecumenical Movement, 1895–1961 (London, 1966), pp. 91–111.
S.B. Harper, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V.S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2000), p. 43.
C.F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India: Its Missionary Aspect (London, 1912), p. 251.
H. Tinker, The Ordeal of Love: C.F. Andrews and India (Oxford, 1979), p. 32.
K.T. Paul, ‘How Missions Denationalize India’, IRM, 8(32) (1919), pp. 510–21.
G. Studdert-Kennedy, Providence and the Raj: Imperial Mission and Missionary Imperialism (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 49–50.
Sir R. Tagore, Nationalism (London, 1917), p. 110.
K.T. Paul, The British Connection with India (London, 1927).
J. Merle Davis, Modern Industry and the African (London, 1933).
R. Robinson, ‘The Moral Disarmament of African Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8(1) (1979), p. 92.
Nazism, W. Ustorf, ‘“Survival of the Fittest”: German Protestant Missions, Nazism and Neocolonialism, 1933–45’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 28(1) (1998), pp. 93–114.
S.K.B. Asante, Pan-African Protest: West Africa and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1934–41 (London, 1977), pp. 45–51.
D. Hudson, The Ecumenical Movement in World Affairs (London, 1969), pp. 86–101.
W.A. Visser’t Hooft, The Genesis and Foundation of the World Council of Churches (Geneva, 1987).
A. Porter, ‘War, Colonialism and the British Experience: The Redefinition of Christian Missionary Policy, 1938–52’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 5(2) (1992), pp. 269–88.
Rev. H.D. Hooper (CMS), ‘The Church and Colonial Development’, in Conference of British Missionary Societies, Report for the Year 1939–40 (1940), p. 62.
J. Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester and New York, 2001), pp. 63–78.
E.M. Jackson, Red Tape and the Gospel: A Study of the Significance of the Ecumenical Missionary Struggle of William Paton (1886–1943) (Birmingham, 1980), pp. 259–75.
K.S. Latourette and W.R. Hogg, World Christian Community in Action: The Story of World War II and Orphaned Missions (New York and London, 1949).
J. Nurser, For All Peoples and All Nations: Christian Churches and Human Rights (Geneva, 2005), pp. 57–62.
W. Paton, ‘The World-Wide Church in Time of War’, Conference of British Missionary Societies, Report for the Year 1940–41 (1941), p. 51.
J.S. Conway, ‘Protestant Missions to the Jews, 1810–1980: Ecclesiastical Imperialism or Theological Aberration?’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1(1) (1986), pp. 135–42.
J. Nurser, ‘The ‘Ecumenical Movement’, Churches, ‘Global Order,’ and Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 25(4) (2003), p. 852.
W. Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘A Curious Grapevine’ (New York, 1998).
J. Macmurray, Challenge to the Churches: Religion and Democracy (London, 1941), p. 59.
R.B. Manikam, ‘The Effect of the War on the Missionary Task of the Church in India’, IRM, 36(142) (1947), pp. 175–90.
A.W.B. Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (New York, 2001), p. 11.
J. Stuart, ‘Scottish Missionaries and the End of Empire: The Case of Nyasaland’, Historical Research, 76(193) (2003), pp. 411–30.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 John Stuart
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stuart, J. (2007). Beyond sovereignty?: Protestant missions, empire and transnationalism, 1890–1950. In: Grant, K., Levine, P., Trentmann, F. (eds) Beyond sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626522_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626522_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54089-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62652-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)