Empires of Religion (review)

This collection of essays is an important contribution to our understanding of Christianity’s place within the British Empire. The essays that comprise the volume are of a uniformly high standard as they explore religious metropoles, missionary work in colonial spaces, and postcolonial transformations in the modern British Empire. Chapters by John MacKenzie and Peter Clayworth offer textured readings of how evangelization produced new visions of race in the Cape Colony and New Zealand, respectively. John McAleer and Elizabeth Prevost explore the place of gender in understandings of mission work and in the construction of Christian communities, while Shurlee Swain’s chapter is a sensitive reading of the child rescue movement. The volume does not have a narrow focus on missionary work, also offering important perspectives on the broader cultural authority of Christianity in the Empire’s sociocultural formations. John Wolffe’s essay offers an effective assessment of the place of anti-Catholicism in the cultural and religious fabric of the Empire. Catherine Hall’s examination of Christianity in the thought and careers of father and son Zachary and Thomas Babington Macaulay offers important insights into the intersections between faith and politics and a calibrated reading of the changing political weight of Christianity. One of the strongest features of the volume is its commitment to locating both Scotland and Ireland within the religious topography of the Empire. Esther Breitenbach offers a very good treatment of Scottish missionary literature while Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin assesses the consolidation of Irish Catholicism in the early modern Empire, and Fiona Bateman foregrounds the significance of territory and landscape in Irish Catholic missionary thought. It is unfortunate that Ó hAnnracháin’s essay is the only contribution to the collection that grapples with the early modern period, and Bateman’s essay, which focuses on the period between the 1850s and 1930s, sits somewhat uneasily in a section entitled “Postcolonial Transformations.”

Hilary M. Carey’s introduction offers an engaging opening and quickly sketches the scholarly terrain. This historiographical map could have been more detailed and offered a fuller assessment of the analytical tensions Carey identifies between “traditional and post-colonial approaches to imperial religious history” (4). The introduction begins by using the five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire (2001) as a litmus test for the place of religion within writing on the history of British empire-building. But using that conservative series of volumes as a guide to the current shape of the field is fundamentally misleading, given that it generally occludes work on environmental history, colonial knowledge, and gender, all of which loom large in recent work on British imperialism. It is certainly true that the national histories of some settler colonies have been framed around secularization, and historical assessments of faith and religious institutions were frequently marginalized by both the new social history and the cultural turn in those contexts. The historiographies of Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, however, are not accurate guides to the overall contours of the historiography of the Empire as a whole. There is no doubt that religion recently has been a central analytical concern. Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter have ensured that we have a richer and more variegated understanding of the development of the missionary movement and the complexity of the relationships between the “Bible and the Flag” during the nineteenth century. Susan Thorne’s work has been central in rematerialising the impact of the missionary movement in Britain itself, while Hall and Alan Lester have demonstrated the ways religion has been threaded through imperial politics and intellectual life. Monographs on missionary encounters by J. D. Y. Peel, Elizabeth Elbourne, and Jeffrey Cox, as well as Jean Allman and John Parker’s history of the West African god Tongnaab have reshaped our understandings of the significance of religion in cross-cultural engagements on imperial frontiers. More broadly still, there is no doubt that the power of Christianity is a central concern in the historiography of modern Africa, and questions of religion have been at the...