God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (review)

The British world in the nineteenth century was a religious world as well as a political, economic, and military world. The Empire afforded an opportunity for an outpouring of voluntarist initiative and effort to spread Christianity—mainly in its Protestant variety—across vast surfaces. This is the subject of Hilary Carey’s new book. It is sharply focused on the mainstream churches, particularly the Anglican communion, with some side glances to the other Protestant and Catholic denominations. The book’s attention is also directed primarily at the question of institution building. How was the Church of England to respond to the challenge to install itself on a world scale? Where did the impetus for its outreach effort come from? Who were to be the subjects of its attention? What was to be expected of its pastoral care, the scope of its community, and such mundane but critical matters as its financing and staffing? Of course, the Established Church had faced these kinds of issues from the moment the North Atlantic community was created. But the nineteenth century expanded and complicated the Christian mission outside of the United Kingdom enormously. It demanded, for example, the creation of a specific training program for clergy destined for the colonies, and it raised continually difficult issues of governance between the metropolitan Church and its colonial branches. These, of course, are issues that resonate today.

Carey’s story, then, tracks the institutional responses to the opening of the world for Christian proselytizing. Her starting point is the evangelical enthusiasm that swept through British culture in the early nineteenth century. It was this wave that underlaid the missionary initiatives aimed at the so-called heathen populations during the same period. But Carey’s concern is not with this effort; she only briefly talks about the Church of England’s outreach to indigenous peoples, for example. In this she follows the Church itself, which was primarily interested in the white Christian communities created in the Empire. The Church was concerned to create a world-wide Christian community, but it thought of this as essentially a white project. Its relationship to the conversion of indigenous peoples and the spread of Christ’s word among the heathen was awkward and ambivalent. One thinks, for example, of the problems that John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, encountered with the Church establishment when he took seriously the notion of equality before Christ as far as the Zulu were concerned.

These are not matters that concern Carey. There is very little in this book that throws light on the Church’s cultural encounter with indigenous peoples. To that extent, the book does not reflect the main recent interests of historians of religion in the Empire. Indeed, from this book one would hardly be aware that there were hardy Anglican missionaries willing to live amongst the Xhosa in South Africa or the Aborigines in Australia and grapple with the complexities of that kind of encounter in the British world. To the contrary, Carey is primarily interested in the ways in which the Church fit into the settler community. It was settler Christianity that the Church thought of first of all when it contemplated the vast spaces of the British world. Indeed, the churches saw their mission primarily as imbuing settler society with its morality and content. In this, of course, they were reflecting a major concern of the second British Empire: how to prevent the settler classes from being decivilized by their contact with the primitive worlds and cultures they were to live among. Thus, for example, the Church figured very large in the Wakefieldian scheme for systematic colonization in the early nineteenth century.

There is no doubt that settler society needed the moral influence of a humanitarian doctrine. But the churches’ record in civilizing settler societies was very mixed. In the main, the churches ended up the captive...