Religion, Difference, and the Limits of British Imperial History

The following books are under consideration in this review:

Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market, by Mary Wilson Carpenter; pp. xxii + 206. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003, $39.95.

Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission, by Rhonda Anne Semple; pp. xvii + 285. Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003, £60.00, $110.00.

The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, edited by Andrew Porter; pp. x + 264. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2003, $45.00, £32.99.

Missions, Nationalism and the End of Empire, edited by Brian Stanley; pp. x + 313. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2003, $45.00, £32.99.

Religion versus Empire?: British Protestantism, Missionaries, and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914, by Andrew Porter; pp. xviii + 373. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2004, £60.00, $74.95, £18.99 paper, $29.95 paper.

Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940, by Jeffrey Cox; pp. ix + 357. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, $55.00.

Critical reflections on the connections between religion and empire building have been central to the rekindling of interest in the history of the British Empire over the past two decades. In the early 1980s, the study of empire was in crisis. Imperial history, an approach that took the Empire as a whole as its analytical field and that was generally seen as both distinct and distant from British history, labored under three significant impediments. First, the growth of national historiographies in each of the former colonies threatened the viability, and even desirability, of imperial history. In a landmark 1984 essay, David Fieldhouse stressed the impossibility of any imperial historian being able to keep up with all the significant research being produced about each colony, making it increasingly necessary for future research to be grounded in a single colonial site that could be used as a vantage point on the Empire as a whole. Certainly given the growing volume and vitality of these national historiographies, the broad history of the Empire and the perspective of imperial history were less likely to appeal to historians based in these former colonies. Second, and following from this, in the early 1980s imperial history as a teaching field often had limited appeal outside British universities. Generally the Empire was not made central in the teaching of British history in colleges in the United States, and imperial history had largely been displaced in other former British colonies, where, as Ann Curthoys has pointed out, national history had become the staple of undergraduate classrooms and where graduate students and academic historians labored to build up detailed pictures of the national past. Third, and to my mind most importantly, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson's work from the 1950s on the economics of the Empire had come not only to dominate imperial history but also threatened to smother it. Robin Winks suggests that Gallagher and Robinson initiated a "historiographical revolution" that not only set the key grounds for academic debate about the imperial past but also dictated the essential approach of two generations of imperial historians (653). Historians following in their wake repeatedly asked the same questions Gallagher and Robinson had—albeit very significant ones about "informal" imperial influence, the role of indigenous "collaborators," and the dynamics of both expansion and decolonization. Graduate students pursued very similar questions whether they were working on Punjab or Rhodesia, and historians used the same kind of sources in the same ways. As a result, imperial historians followed narrow channels of research, testing the Gallagher–Robinson thesis—which had seen imperial expansion as emerging out of local crises in the periphery rather than being driven by any metropolitan ideology—for its applicability to various locales and at various points in time. This focus in turn pushed a range of other important research areas—including...