The British Zion: Congregationalism, Politics, and Empire, 1790-1850

Notes

147 Notes Introduction 1 E. Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, ed. B. Semmel (Chicago: 1971), 1. See also Halévy, A History of the English People in the 19th Century, vol. 1, England in 1815 (New York: 1961). 2 R. W. Davis, Dissent in Politics, 1780–1830: The Political Life of William Smith, MP (London: 1971), xiv. 3 T. Larsen, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, Tex.: 2004), 145; see also Larsen, Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England (Woodbridge, UK: 1999). For a broader range of the history of dissent and politics, also see J. E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: 1990); R. Floyd, Religious Dissent and Political Modernization: Church, Chapel and Party in Nineteenth Century England (New York: 2007); G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain: 1832 to 1868 (Oxford: 1977). 4 See, e.g., L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: 1987); A. D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, 1740–1914 (London: 1976); A. A. McLaren, Religion and Social Class (London: 1974); H. McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London, and New York, 1870–1914 (New York: 1996); D. Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton: 1985); J. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, 1843–1945 (London: 1994). 5 The classic example is E. P. Thompson’s treatment of Methodism in The Making of the English Working Class (New York: 1963). See also R. Hole, 148 Notes to pp. 2–4 Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: 1989); T. W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and English Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven: 1976); R. Moore, Pit-Men, Preachers and Politics (Cambridge: 1974); and the work of J. Seed on English Unitarians, e.g., “Theologies of Power: Unitarianism and the Social Relations of Religious Discourse, 1800–50,” in Morris, Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns, 107–56. 6 A. L. Stoler and F. Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 1–56. 7 C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination , 1830–1867 (Chicago: 2002); S. Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford: 1999). U. S. Mehta also argues that the rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberalism masked an exclusionary logic when applied by British liberals to colonized peoples. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: 1999). 8 M. Watts’ monumental study of nineteenth-century Dissent provides ample evidence of the social diversity of nonconformist churches, especially his meticulous analysis of the religious census of 1851. See Watts, The Dissenters , vol. 2 (Oxford: 1995) esp. 22–30, 558–92, and appendices 1 and 2. For a challenge to assumptions about the links between urbanization and secularization , see H. McLeod, ed., European Religion in the Age of Great Cities (London: 1995), especially the chapters by C. G. Brown and S. Williams. D. Hempton’s The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (London: 1996) also convincingly demonstrates the relevance and appeal of evangelical religion across a broad social spectrum in early nineteenth-century Britain. 9 This generalization, of course, oversimplifies a more complex array of historiographical interpretations. A first generation of postwar African historians, such as J. F. A. Ajayi and E. A. Ayandele, presented judicious accounts of the impact of the missionary movement, albeit from a decidedly non-European perspective. See Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891 (London: 1965) and Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1842–1914 (London: 1966). For examples of a more antagonistic assessment, strongly influenced by Marxist theory, see A. Dachs, “Christian Missionary Enterprise and Sotho-Tswana Societies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Dachs, Christianity South of the Zambezi, vol. 1, 53–62; M. Legassick, “The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries” (Ph.D. diss., University of California , Los Angeles, 1969); A. Temu and B. Swai, Historians and Africanist History : A Critique—Post-Colonialist Historiography Examined (London: 1981); J. S. Dharmarah, Colonialism and Christian Mission: Post-Colonial Reflections (Delhi: 1993). For a defense of the liberal tradition, in the South African context, against the criticisms of Marxist and other scholars, see J. Butler, R. Elphick...