Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England, and: Good Citizens: British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870-1918 (review)

Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England, by Susan Thorne; pp. ix + 247. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, $51.00.

Good Citizens: British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1780-1918, by James M. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston; pp. xxi + 274. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999, $49.95.

"British historians" commented Shula Marks in 1990, "have largely failed to ask what empire has done to us" (History Workshop Journal 29: 11). Susan Thorne's Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England is a significant contribution to the growing body of work which aims to address the issue of the effects of empire in the metropole. Her focus is on the Congregationalists, the third largest denomination by the second half of the nineteenth century, and their missionary organization, the London Missionary Society. Through an examination of the language and practices of the men and women attached to the congregational cause across the century, Thorne aims to explicate the importance of empire to metropolitan life and thought. The empire, argues Thorne, "enjoyed a much broader social catchment than is often assumed, one that encompassed the influential fraction of the provincial middle class as well as a substantial minority within the working-class population" (3-4). Missions, established to counter heathenism both at home and abroad, provided a language through which middle-class and working-class men and women imagined themselves in relation to their nation's empire. Missions thus played a part in constructing languages of popular politics, class formation, the birth of feminism, and the rise and decline of liberalism. Reading her mission texts closely, Thorne situates them in the local and the everyday and argues that the colonial encounter was a primary element of the discursive constitution of class. Imperial identifications, she argues, rather than marking a retreat from class, were a precondition for class identities. "The ideas about class that British colonizers brought with them to the Empire were already raced," she suggests, "having been constructed on the basis of a social nomenclature whose primary referent was the colonial encounter" (15). Imperial identities "were the medium through which domestic identities of class as well as gender were forged" (21).

One of the strengths of Thorne's book is the way in which she traces this constitution of social identities across the nineteenth century, discerning significant shifts across time. Here the historian's concern with questions of continuity and change becomes crucial. In their founding phase, at the intersection of the evangelical revival, middle-class formation, and the transition from the first to the second Empire, missions were implicitly oppositional to the official colonial project--as in their opposition to slavery in the Caribbean. By mid-century the evangelical middle class had emerged as a significant force, and race and class, she argues, had converged so that the poor at home were increasingly associated with heathen paupers. The dissenting middle class had moved from the margins to the centre of English society and culture, and the missions had significantly contributed to this process, Thorne suggests, by associating their respectable membership with the nation. By the late-nineteenth century, missionary philanthropy was becoming heavily feminised. Women became more involved with the public face of mission work, while men took on new positions in the civic and political worlds. Congregations, whether liberal or socialist, predominantly middle class or working class, were encouraged to identify with the empire--an identification which reversed the convergence of race and class. The deepening of the racial divide in the colonies had its counterpart in the racial unification of British society across classes: race functioned as an important marker of and means by which working-class men were incorporated into a...