Introduction: The Civilizing Mission

The phrase “civilizing mission” invites cliché. As a label for a style of thought during the nineteenth century, it embodied the simplification of diverse peoples and historical experiences into conceptual boxes like “savage” and “barbaric”—suffocating containers that led to misjudgments by would-be rulers and inspired repudiation and revolt by their subjects. It was a style of thought whose high cost could be seen at home in Europe, with dramatic force on a national level in the enthusiasm for “civilizing” one’s fellow citizens in the rush of enthusiasm that followed from political unification in Italy and Germany. In Italy, national unification of the peninsula was followed by a violent southern resistance to northern authorities, creating a mutual tension that has not entirely subsided to this day; in Germany the “culture war” (Kulturkampf) of Protestants against Catholics had the opposite of its intended effect and mobilized Catholics in their own political party. Beyond the bounds of Europe, civilizing missions produced even greater changes in national political cultures. Among the essays in this issue, Stefan Hübner provides the most striking illustrations of this in grotesque cartoon illustrations of non-Europeans. The well-mannered members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the subject of Kira Thurman’s essay, were greeted with applause by their upper-class German audiences, but also had to engage in their own patient counter-mission of breaking down misconceptions about their character and appearance on the part of well-meaning aristocrats who expected them to appear in “native” African costume.

Taken at this level of discursive stereotype (which is only the point of departure for Hübner’s and Thurman’s rich essays), the phrase “civilizing mission” is little more than ideological superstructure. In that case it would simply be a disguise for the real economic and political motives driving nineteenth-century societies; we could quickly dismiss it and get down to the serious business of analyzing the pursuit of power and profit that resulted in the expansion of old European empires and the creation of new ones, prominently including that of the United States, a republican nation in its late eighteenth-century founding, which turned into a hegemonic world power a century later. The large literature on colonial discourses that has dominated much scholarly discussion in recent decades has, in its own way, complicated this picture in important respects. It has pointed out the autonomy and staying power of linguistic discourses, which can persist over centuries; and it has drawn attention to the close contacts between colonizer and colonized wherever Europeans expanded, whether through the establishment of political regimes or through less formal political and economic influence. The semantic shift from “imperialism” to “colonialism” in scholarly studies signifies this shift in attention from metropolitan centers to places of encounter, on the whole as a gain for historical scholarship.

The essays in this issue collectively take a significant step beyond the existing literature on civilizing missions. They do so by breaking down the terms “civilizing” and “mission” and asking us to examine their conjuncture. Each of these terms has its own history; each must be understood apart from the other before one can appreciate the peculiar dynamic of their historical trajectory after they converged. What results from this analytical approach is an articulation of “civilizing mission” which reveals new dimensions of it as integral to society and state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“Civilizing” as it is used in these essays refers primarily to the external appearance of the colonized as the outpost of significant cultural exchanges and appropriations. Clothes and manners seem to have played a significant part in the civilizing mission of the German Protestant girl’s school in Beirut, which is discussed by Julia Hauser: it was a quasi-monastic island of European order and simplicity where the signs of an attainment of discipline were the ideal, along with the ability to speak a “civilized” European language. The Russian administrators of Turkestan described by Ulrich Hofmeister had a pragmatic awareness of the limits of their power and were largely content to “civilize” the population of the region through the successful imposition of administrative and civic order, without wanting to tread far in the direction of a subjective russification. The Fisk Jubilee Singers present a different kind of case: here the agent was not a foreign colonizer, but the representatives of an emancipated group who made up the choir. They were superb at self-presentation. In this way they were comparable to the large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants to the United States who worked to assimilate as rapidly as possible into white Protestant norms of appearance and behavior. A later generation might regard this as a loss of ethnic identity, but they thought of themselves as completing a process that began with their exit from their home countries; it was an act of self-emancipation to leave behind traditional patterns of speech and dress. For European immigrants, as for the Fisk Singers, education was often thought to be the vehicle of this process of absorption into middle-class norms.

T.J. Tallie concentrates on clothing as one aspect of “civilizing” through westernization of external appearance in colonial Natal, where a campaign for westernization of clothing culminated in the passage in 1880 of a Clothing the Natives bill. The concern with clothing was a longstanding one in the history of European-indigenous relations: Jean de Léry described how, on his Huguenot voyage to Brazil in the sixteenth century, even whippings could not force the missionaries’s Tupinamba slave women to keep themselves covered up to conform to European standards of decency. In the nineteenth century, observers regularly signaled approval or disapproval by describing the Western or non-Western attire of native peoples. So Charles Darwin, in his account of the voyage of the Beagle, mentioned the nakedness of six Fuegians as part of his general portrait of the depths of savagery. Westerners could of course flip the valences and celebrate primitivism: the American artist George Catlin painted Native American warriors in their native martial splendor, thereby creating a valuable ethnography for future researches, while regretting the “degenerate” look of a chief who adopted Western clothing. A far more complex iconography is the Oceanian art of Paul Gauguin, whose paintings show a wide range of Tahitian possibilities late in the nineteenth century. To be sure, many of his paintings put on display the erotic charge of Tahitian women, a reproof by the self-proclaimed “savage” French artist to the norms of bourgeois civilization. Yet major paintings by Gauguin also show Westernized, attractively dressed Tahitian women in simplified but respectable interiors. Clothing, as a historical source of controversy and accommodation, reveals an entire spectrum of commentaries on the relationship between indigenous and European ways of life.

Civilizing through reform of appearance spills over again and again, in the following essays, into the second of the conjoined terms. We see in these essays how “mission” was not just a metaphor for the process of bringing outsiders into a scientific and secular civilization, but referred to an actual ambition to make converts for Christianity. In the case of Hofmeister’s administrators in Turkestan, they dreamed of eventually turning their Muslim subjects into Christians, but recognized that doing so would be a disaster at an early stage of colonization. A small number of missionaries were admitted to work among nomads, and during an upsurge of nationalism under Alexander III (1881–1894), demands for missionizing grew in the metropolis; but on the whole the administrators resisted. Stefan Hübner presents an intriguing example of missionizing and its limits in the Far Eastern Championship Games. Underlying the founding of these games by YMCA administrators was a Protestant conception of Muscular Christianity, linking religious faith to physical fitness and its accompanying virtues. At one level, Asians increasingly resisted this imposition of a Protestant ideal, and after World War I they pushed out Western administrators and turned the games into an affirmation of an intra-Asian identity. Yet any reader of Max Weber will recognize in modern fitness regimes one of the cultural successors to the Protestant Ethic, bringing to the body an ascetic discipline leading to desired character traits such as self-control and self-confidence. The self-empowerment resulting from training and competition seems to have been part of the attractiveness of the Far Eastern Championship Games. Again, as with clothing and deportment for a group like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, feelings of emancipation and autonomy could actually result from an internalization of European cultural, in this specific case religious, offerings.

Jesse Murray’s essay on missionary activity in Siberia leads deep into the many and difficult conditions that constrained nineteenth-century missionaries. The peoples of eastern Siberia had many different, local religious traditions. Particularly trying for missionaries to grapple with was the presence of both indigenous religious practices and Buddhism, a later import from China. The missionaries created artificial intellectual distinctions to guide their missionary work. The Buddhists, whom they regarded as obdurate, were in their view a foreign import into the region, misleading representatives of the principles of their religion, venal, and opposed to settling the Buryats as farmers. As for indigenous religions, missionaries bundled different practices together under the name “Shamanism,” which originally referred to the practices of just one geographic area. In the eighteenth century they had regarded it as a degenerate import from India, but now they understood it to be a primitive form of scientific explanation and of magic; they were optimistic that its practitioners would be receptive to Orthodox Christianity. To put together their case, they drew on all the resources of nineteenth-century scholarship and science, developing ethnographies and learned arguments to create the simplified categories of Shamanism and “Lamaism”—supposedly the local form of Buddhism—which were an artificial reduction of a far more complex local religious landscape. In this way they laid the foundation for scholarly and public interpretations of these religions, in particular Shamanism, that have persisted to this day.

Civilizing missions began in the nineteenth century, and continued until recently in the scholarly literature, as the name for an imposition of an external order or inner principles on colonized peoples. Yet as we learn from these essays, the reality was quite different. It was something closer to a cultural style that took on different forms in different situations. Sometimes it involved a large degree of external imposition, but at other times, non-Europeans appropriated Western culture for their own ends. Another point that emerges from the essays with striking unanimity: the role of religion in the civilizing process. The authors’ fresh research and narratives are a reminder that the civilizing process at its most aggressive attempted to bring about a fundamental psychological transformation of peoples not yet integrated into modern European culture. The means of this transformation included modern religious principles and forms of behavior that since the seventeenth century have enjoyed, in Max Weber’s phrase, an elective affinity with Western religion, especially the ascetic Protestant forms strongly developed in Britain and the United States. It was precisely these ascetic forms of Christianity that informed the London Missionary Society, predominated in the main American missionary organization (the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, or ABCFM), and was not far from the surface of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the YMCA of Thurman’s and Hübner’s respective essays. In differing degrees, non-Europeans knew how to make these foreign imports their own. The most striking example is the Japanese, who famously imported Western technology and culture on their own terms in the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, this ideology was mainly the property of European powers and the United States. Yet we are reminded by these essays that their worldwide hegemonic moment initiated a wider and longer-lasting era of civilizing missions. Even as their self-confidence in a civilizing mission began to decline after World War I, other powers could adopt the idea to their own ends, using it to combine ancient histories of spiritual and political empires with expansionist ambitions for the twentieth century and beyond.