Imperial Pieties

World religion poses a particular challenge to social historians of modern capitalism inasmuch as it expresses aspirations that transcend individual moorings and economic self-interest. 'Give all that you have to the poor and follow me' is perhaps less well remembered than Jesus's injunction to 'Go forth unto all lands'. Nevertheless, the command captures the potential challenge of the conversion experience associated with the Evangelical Revival that gave birth to the modern missionary project. To be born again is to cast off all that once defined you or at the very least to subordinate self-interest to the will of God. And missionaries did sacrifice their own and their family members' health and often lives in service to the mission cause.

In the immediate aftermath of decolonization, indigenous and other critics of Empire dismissed European missionaries as hypocritical functionaries of the colonial ruling elite. That the transformative agenda at the heart of their gospel was somehow implicated in the changes being wrought by the British colonial state is a premise whose roots lie deep in the colonial period itself. Christian missionaries of all denominational stripes and national origins proselytized in British colonies, often working with the full support and authorization of the colonial state, whether to ensure permission to operate or to secure fiscal subsidies. The state returned the favour by invoking missionary services to colonized peoples as a justification for European imperial advance, designating Christianity preeminent among the gifts bestowed upon the rest of the world by western civilization.

John and Jean Comaroff were prominent among the anthropologists and historians whose research, published during the 1980s and 1990s, complicated this postcolonial tendency to reduce missions to Empire. Their magisterial two-volume study Of Revelation and Revolution was an important contribution to a broad effort to rethink the culture of colonialism as a more contested and contingent space.¹ The Comaroffs underscored the marginality of most missionaries in the colonial social order, even while framing them as lightning rods of the many tensions of Empire, citing their energetic defence of colonized people's land and their recurring conflicts with traders, settlers, the military, and official bureaucracy. The Comaroffs, however, insist on the distinction between motive and consequence. However much missionaries may have intended to befriend the 'native', their presence contributed to the consolidation of European colonial hegemony. The textual transmission of Christian doctrine along with the quotidian realities of mission station life helped to colonize consciousness itself, and far more effectively than the brute expropriation of land and coercion of labour pursued by rival sectors of the European colonial community.

The editorial introduction to this skilfully assembled collection of essays argues that the missionary association with Empire is greatly exaggerated even if not especially by the Comaroffs and their successors. Etherington provocatively claims that 'the trajectories of missions and Empire hardly bear comparison', and that 'the history of missions can be written without much attention to Empire'. This volume bases its claims to the reader's attention on the alternative formulation 'that, although missions and the official Empire were quite different operations, they play related parts in a larger drama – the spread of modernization, globalization, and Western cultural hegemony'.

Unlike most scholarship on missions (or Empire more generally for that matter), this volume adopts a comparative perspective and a broad chronological sweep. The contributors' geographical areas of expertise encompass most of the major foreign-mission fields that became part of the British Empire (although there is considerably more emphasis on the neglected Pacific than the relatively more attended Atlantic theatre). The authors were encouraged to adopt a thematic rather than a geographical focus, resulting in useful reflection on topics ranging from missionary encounters with settlers, missionary relations with indigenous authorities in not yet colonized regions of the world, convert evangelism, syncretism, women, language, anthropology, medicine and decolonization. That comparative perspective illuminates one of the volume's inescapable conclusions: the indeterminacy of individual missionaries' relationship to Empire...