Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England. By Susan Thorne (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 247 pp. $49.50

Students of the British empire routinely focus upon the colonies and the governing elite at home that managed them. With this approach, Thorne begs to differ. In her account, the imperial process not only flowed outward from Britain to transform subject lands; it was also a reverse transit of influences that reshaped culture and thought on the home front. Documenting the impact of imperial experience upon social discourse and practices at home, the study reveals a shortcoming of social history--the work of Thompson and his students offers a case in point--written with little reference to the larger imperial world.¹ Showing that the empire had "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," it also models ways in which historians of empire might rethink their subject from the bottom up (4).

The urban middle class and workers experienced the empire in a variety of ways, but in a period when one-half the adult population attended church and even more had some experience of Sunday school, the Protestant foreign-missions movement was a major mediator and shaper of that experience. By c. 1900, a large majority of dissenting chapels, together with many parish churches of evangelical bent, were enlisted in support of denominational missionary societies. Missions certainly made a large contribution to the transit of culture and domination outward into the colonies, but they also served as a vehicle for the flow of information and interpretation back into the mother country. Through their large promotional literature, their fund-raising campaigns and sponsorship of missionary visits and lectures, they offered frequent contact with the colonial world. The empire thus encountered had a measurably powerful impact upon social discourse and practice, most notably in the realms of class formation, gender relations, and the rise and fall of English liberalism.

Thorne explores these dynamics through a case study of the Congregational churches. This large dissenting denomination had a popular base in the urban middle and working classes, included some of the most prominent nonconformists of the era, and was a strong supporter of missions and principal sponsor of the London Missionary Society (founded 1795). Pursuing its engagement with missions and empire through the nineteenth century, Thorne develops a number of intriguing arguments. To cite two examples: First, the foreign missionary movement contributed to the making, or remaking, of the Victorian middle class and to its sense of itself in relation to Others both above and below on the social scale. Second, missionary philanthropy throughout the course of the century attracted more women, whose middle-class respectability discouraged contact with the lower-class clientele of home missions. They took on more prominent roles in foreign missions agencies.

At every step, the author strives to recover the cultural setting of ideas, reading publications and correspondence of the London Missionary Society and other missionary texts in reference to their local and institutional contexts. At every step, too, she leans upon a moderate version of the highly constructed metaphorics of sites, inscriptions, and the like, which has become a commonplace of current historiography. The author provides future students of historiography with obvious clues to the cultural and ideological settings within which her book emerged.

Theodore Dwight Bozeman
University of Iowa

Note

1. See, for example, Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964).

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