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

In this lucid and nuanced rereading of the missionary archive in early New Zealand, Tony Ballantyne makes impressively wide-ranging arguments about the centrality of the body to the thickening “entanglements” between indigenous peoples and British evangelists between 1814 and 1840. In this period, the first Protestant missions were established in the far north of what was known to Europeans as New Zealand, which in 1840 was annexed as a British colony. Retracing well-trodden ground in this nation’s history writing, Ballantyne presents a fresh argument that the “reform of the indigenous body” was in fact central to the missionary enterprise in New Zealand and a key indicator to missionaries and others of its success or failure (7). Moreover, he claims that Māori in large part resisted and even undermined missionary attempts to bring them into the fold. Of particular interest to historians of sexuality will be his methodological intervention in the field. Urging these scholars to go beyond a focus on sexuality as the dominant frame for bringing bodies into historical focus, he instead proposes a “more mobile and flexible history of the body” (9). This approach, he argues, is more attuned to the imperial dynamics and networks at play in the particular story he tells. He hopes the method he deploys in revisiting this particular historical example will lead scholars working in other imperial spaces to new investigations of struggles over the body and to new ways of analyzing how material and cultural changes mark bodies and lead them into entanglements.

At the leading edge of new historical scholarship on empire that emphasizes the importance of networks of connection, Ballantyne convincingly demonstrates how a frontier story of cross-cultural engagement and struggle is best told by using the analytical frame he has previously called the “webs of empire.”¹ He demonstrates the importance of such an effort on two levels. On the level of his historical subject matter, Ballantyne underscores the contemporary networks that brought missionaries to New Zealand in the early nineteenth century and the wider discourses and interests that framed their attempts at conversion of local tribes. This method also allows him to show how Māori themselves became increasingly enmeshed in imperial networks. At the second level, Ballantyne fluently parses his own argument in relation to and distinction from a vast array of scholarship on imperialism and Christian missions, cross-cultural history, the history of sexuality, and feminist historiography. Thus, in a much-needed local intervention, he reconnects New Zealand history to broad and diverse scholarly debates.

The six chapters of the book are thematically organized and loosely follow a chronological sequence. Chapter 1 examines the “imperial social formation” (a term he adopts from the work of historian Mrinalini Sinha) that brought missionaries and Māori into ongoing engagement (27). It focuses in particular on CMS missionary Samuel Marsden, who established the first station in New Zealand in 1814 and who prioritized the work of “civilization” and “improvement” by promoting agriculture and trade among Māori, activities he believed would then lead to conversion. Chapters 2 and 3 critically assess this work of improvement, which Ballantyne argues largely failed to achieve what missionaries hoped it might. Until 1830, most of the mission stations were economically dependent on the Māori communities they wished to convert and were reliant for survival on the power and prestige of the chiefs who accommodated them. Māori people’s own bodily practices continued to have most relevance even as they began to incorporate new ideas. For instance, in the 1820s some communities began to observe the Sabbath as a sacred day of rest, one example of the missionaries’ success in the reordering of time. But Ballantyne explains that this actually resulted from a compatibility with existing spiritual ideas and the growing economic independence of the particular stations in those areas.

Chapter 4 emphasizes...