Nature and Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (review)

The relationship between nineteenth-century missionary activity and Britain's "second empire" has stimulated a range of scholars in various disciplines from the 1990s onwards. It is a curiously contested field. Staunch advocates of old-fashioned imperial history find in missions a bunker hole from which to ride out theoretical innovations and postcolonial influences. Ex-missionaries find in academic study a different kind of retreat: a furlough that tends to reproduce—uncannily, and sometimes unwittingly—the hagiographic histories familiar to those who have waded through their nineteenth-century precursors. A new generation of scholars, often working across disciplinary boundaries in the humanities, find in the missionary archive a rich seam of sources that debate key questions about cultural contact, social change, and the complexities of colonial projects and imperial-colonial relationships. Sujit Sivasundaram's Nature and Godly Empire joins a number of recent publications in the latter camp—including Jean and John Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution (1991), Vanessa Smith's Literary Culture and the Pacific (1998), Susan Thorne's Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (1999), Elizabeth Elbourne's Blood Ground (2002), and my Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (2003)—and explores a key region of nineteenth-century mission activity, focusing on evangelical science, which is a fascinating aspect of the history and one that speaks to contemporary debates in the history, philosophy, and literature of science. Sivasundaram makes a compelling argument for science as a key plank of evangelical ideology and for missionary natural history as an important form of nineteenth-century knowledge: one that cannot be reduced to merely religion, science, or colonialism, but which forms an interlocking modality of colonial knowledge that established a highly influential non-elite science.

Nature and Godly Empire makes its most important contribution in this area. Sivasundaram carefully traces the history of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the intellectual and religious millieu of its formation. This allows him to examine a fascinating range of sources, from the lectures given to missionaries before leaving England, to more conventional missionary histories, journals, and memoirs, to the ephemera that surrounded one of the most popular social movements of the nineteenth century (including board games, maps, collected "heathen idols," and illustrations). These eclectic sources combine with a creative exploration of ideas surrounding missionaries and natural science so that the study includes discussions of missionary agronomy, evangelical theologies of death and sacrifice, missionary education, and museological displays. The relationships between these different sites of knowledge formation could be theorised a little more, but Sivasundaram argues well in his conclusion for the necessity of broadening both the sources and the manner of their use when we attempt to reveal competing forms of knowledge. Such a methodology allows him to trace what he calls "the constitutive practices of missionary natural history" (213), an idea that does much to integrate his varied fields of interest and which combines metropolitan theories of evangelical outreach with the complex lived experience of missionaries in the field. Broadening the source material and engaging with both metropolitan elite and the colonial (and indigenous) non-elite perspectives clearly positions this study within current innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship on missions.

Interdisciplinary work has its dangers, of course, and one is that the defenders of disciplinary boundaries have surprising influence and resilience. It is unfortunate that Sivasundaram must so carefully navigate the shoals of arguments made by Brian Stanley, Andrew Porter, and others, which seek to minimise the place of empire in nineteenth-century missionary ideology when, ultimately, he wants to make a much more sophisticated and interesting argument about how "providential colonialism" (56) is not coterminous with state-led imperialism but certainly colludes with it and benefits from its presence (albeit in complex and varying ways in different places). Another inevitable danger of interdisciplinarity is that new questions in one discipline have...