Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in north-east India by Andrew May (review)

Andrew May’s Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism is a beautifully written and extensively researched study of mission and empire in the Khasi Hills of north-east India. In examining this particular area, it uses a geographical linchpin to carefully interrogate the colonial encounter, looking at colonial agents, missionaries and the Indigenous people in their local and global interactions. In May’s own memorable words, “the geography of the Shillong plateau has set a physical and mental proscenium framing empire’s actors, as they shuffle on and off stage in a deceptively cohesive display” (248). Indeed, May is particularly good at thinking about the contingent, disjointed and fragile nature of the colonial experience. As such he gives an excellent sense of the mutual interdependence of European actors inhabiting sometimes ambiguous and oftentimes shifting roles on the colonial and spiritual frontier. Indeed, this book strongly recognises the powerlessness of such actors, and draws out the multiple senses in which Europeans were reliant on local peoples and knowledge, even at the same time as labelling them “backward” or “barbaric,” and thus drawing them into a colonial mindset continually mindful of its own moral justifications.

Indeed, May himself is especially wary of simplistic labels—of the local peoples and of the European and colonial actors themselves. “If the first instinct of this book is to disrupt the monolithic category of missionary, it has a further and wilful purpose to penetrate other essentialising labels—British, Indian, soldier, scientist, merchant, administrator.” These labels, says May, “blur the complex interactions and negotiations of imperialists and indigenous peoples” (3). After all, “the practised subjectivities of individual British agents in the hills—the ways in which they actually experienced the world and intervened in it—could defy the simple nomenclature of their titles” (269). As such, the book is strongly rooted in the idea of the micro-narrative and micro-history, and is thus a “local-level study of the ways in which macro-processes play out for individual people” (5). The problem, says May, is that it is easy to lose the individual, the personal and the “micro” when studying something as gigantic as empire(s). This book seeks an everyday approach to history, and achieves that aim extremely well, through close analysis, an exceptional breadth and depth of archival work, and a nuanced attention to the human dynamics of colonial interaction.

Interestingly this book thus fits well into what we might call the social turn in imperial history. As much as imperial history has been influenced (and reinvented) by the cultural turn of the last twenty or so years, it has also been experiencing its own social turn as scholars such as Thomas Beidelman, Nicholas Thomas and the Comaroffs seek to flesh out the individual and contested characteristics of everyday encounter. This has been a particularly fruitful area in the study of Christian missions, which allow for in-depth analyses of grass roots encounter and exchange. This is far more than using case studies to prove or disprove sweeping theories and narratives. Rather, this is about recognising the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience—exactly how those grand narratives can be contested, reshaped and refined by attention to what May calls “trivial and minute actions, and... real people making real choices” (5). The move towards thinking globally about the local, and locally about the global, is of course not new, but this books stands as an excellent example of what sustained attention to the micro can achieve.

In some ways, then, this is a book about specificity—and particularly in terms of the “categories of ‘Christian’ and ‘British’ [which] need to be nuanced by closer attention to ‘Calvinistic Methodist’ and ‘Welsh’” (13). In others, it is about breadth, and the global Christian and cultural encounter in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, “standing metaphorically at the side of the road leading from the plains to the hills provides an uncommon vantage point for reconsideration...