Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body by Tony Ballantyne (review)

Missionary histories were once rather sleepy and specialized works, often draped in denominational garb. No more. Over the past two decades, and especially as a consequence of the cultural turn, a growing number of historians have turned their attention to the encounters between missionaries and Indigenous peoples on the frontiers of empire. Jeffrey Cox, Elizabeth Elbourne, Catherine Hall, and many others have contributed to this now vibrant field of study. With his new book on the Protestant missionaries who established a first foothold in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century, Tony Ballantyne joins them.

While others have written about this subject, Ballantyne pushes against those who portray the Maori as mere victims of cultural imperialism by British missionaries. Instead, he stresses Maori agency and argues that their encounter with missionaries had mutually entangling effects that were especially evident in bodily practices. He focuses mainly on the first two decades of the Christian Missionary Society mission in the Bay of Islands, founded by Samuel Marsden in 1814. Combining a close reading of missionary letters and reports with a nuanced understanding of Maori cultural practices, Ballantyne highlights the vulnerability of the missionaries and the accommodations they made to their Indigenous hosts.

In chapter two (“Making Place, Reordering Space”), Ballantyne shows that Maori authorities determined the locations of mission stations and that Maori models and materials were used to construct mission dwellings. Missionaries erected stockade-like fences to keep the Maori at a distance, but their stations became culturally mixed spaces nonetheless. The next chapter (“Economics, Labor, and Time”) argues that missionaries failed to instill in the Maori the sense of work discipline or “industriousness” that they considered crucial to the civilizing mission. Their access to Maori labour occurred on Maori terms and they became enmeshed in a Maori political economy that relied heavily on slaves. Yet the violence that Maori masters meted out on their slaves shocked the missionaries, who were imbued with an evangelical view of death that stood in stark contrast with Maori attitudes. This is the subject of chapter five (“Cultures of Death”), which argues that Maori death rituals and burial practices became one of the principal ways missionaries sought to make sense of these people’s spiritual beliefs. At the same time, missionaries’ own burial practices underwent modification as a result of their engagements with the Maori.

Ballantyne also acknowledges that the Maori underwent changes as a result of their encounters with missionaries. He notes, for example, that they were quick to embrace literacy — one of several European technologies that changed their lives — and accepted the Sabbath once it was framed in terms of their traditional tapu. But the most dramatic changes in Maori belief and custom came after Ballantyne ends his study in the early 1830s. It is only then, for example, that large numbers of Maori begin to convert to Christianity.

Ballantyne is right to remind us that the missionaries operated “from a position of weakness” (255) during the first two decades of their encounters with the Maori and that they were therefore more susceptible to Maori influence than their metropolitan publicists acknowledged. But do the mutual entanglements that lie at the heart of Ballantyne’s argument persist once the balance of power turns more clearly in Europeans’ favour from the 1830s onward? The chronological limits of Ballantyne’s study leave this question unanswered, but it calls for attention at several points in the book. In chapter four (“Containing Transgression”), Ballantyne examines the case of William Yale, a missionary who came to New Zealand in 1828, but was forced to leave in 1836 when it became known that he had coerced a number of Maori boys and young men to have sex with him. This is a story about bodies, to be sure, but it is also a story about power, one that suggests missionaries were gaining the upper hand in their relations with...