Search

Christian missionaries spread across the African continent in the early twentieth century following the expansion of colonial control, and invested in various areas of African societies in order to gain converts. This paper describes the recent literature in economic history that attempts to document and estimate the long-run impacts of Christian missions, including outstanding issues in the literature. The paper summarizes recent studies that attempt to tackle these issues. One conclusion is that more micro data is needed on the evolution of African societies as a result of missionary activities in order to fully document the mechanisms behind the long-run impact of missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1883, Thomas Patrick Hughes, the director of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Peshawar published a romance novel set along the Afghan frontier of British India. This paper argues that Hughes's romance novel, Ruhainah, offers an alternative perspective on the role of evangelism in the empire by attending to the importance of affect and desire in the mission's project. Scholars of Christian missionary work have debated the role of missionaries in projects of empire, but this scholarship is frequently limited by a dichotomous debate: Did missionaries of the British Empire reify imperial control? Or, in the name of Christian universalism, did these missionaries resist the empire's violence and racism? Through heuristically adopting Ruhainah as a guide to the numerous publications of the CMS in Peshawar and the archives of personal correspondences of CMS officials, this paper cuts across these dichotomies by demonstrating that Hughes used his various writings to train his readers to romanticise and desire the Christianization of the Afghans. While Hughes's variously resisted and reified imperial policies, his writing used this very tension between Christian universalism and racist particularism to cultivate 'an affect of empire' and a desire for the religious encounters possible along the Afghan frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the "intellectual monoculture" that organizes American IPE, this paper draws on Inayatullah and Blaney's conception of ethnological IPE and Escobar's analysis of the production and management of poverty in the Third World in order to study Appalachia. The paper focuses on Christian missionaries and educators and their work among populations of poor whites at the Konnarock Training School for girls. It shows how diverse actors transformed a stable set of social differences into stark interpretations of neediness, institutionalized those interpretations, and enacted them onto the bodies of locals in specific ways that reflected global, colonial patterns of stark inequality (1830–1930). The paper is organized into an historical narrative with four main points of examination: the contact zone where class and religious differences emerge as politically significant interpretations of neediness; the institutionalization of those differences as neediness through the construction of a church, mission, and school; the educator's discursive production of class and religious differences in a global context through their writings in a missionary magazine; and the educator's discursive production of scientifically measured differences of race, particularly a degraded whiteness. Through a cultural political economy of colonialism, Appalachia was produced as a peripheral zone populated by a marginal people within the world's economic core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the Islamic expansion in Greater Senegambia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from an Atlantic perspective. It discusses the spread of the Islamic faith in West Africa and its diasporic continuities in Portugal and the New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia) based on African oral traditions, scholarship from Africa and the Americas, chronicles, letters, and reports by European missionaries, travelers, traders, bureaucrats, and Inquisitorial and canonical prosecutions. The Islamic concept of da'wa, I argue, enabled Islamic preachers to reach out to a wide range of Senegambians before the Muslim revolutions. This expansion can be seen in the diaspora, primarily Wolof, and in the restraints imposed by African Muslims on Christian missionaries in Africa and the Americas. The knowledge produced in qur'anic schools was essential to Islamic social expansion, the preservation of Islamic belief in the diaspora, and the political orchestration that led to the jihads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the Missions in Oceania during the German Colonial Period conference hosted by the Excellenzcluster in Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures in Munster, Germany October 5 to 7, 2017 is presented. The conference explores the linkages between colonial enterprises in the Pacific Islands and the Christian missionary societies, specifically the Catholic Herz-Jesu or Sacred Heart missionaries. Speakers include Thoralf Klein, Georg Evers, and Livia Rigotti.

Mamae of Mangaia was a nineteenth-century pastor of the London Missionary Society, and a tribal historian whose significant collection of oral traditions forms the foundations of present day knowledge of pre-Christian Mangaian society, as disseminated through the scholarship of the missionary-ethnographer, William Wyatt Gill, and Māori anthropologist, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck). Amongst Mamae's many literary works is a collection of letters that forms the basis of this paper. Letters bring us closer to a writer's personality and to their experience of a particular social and cultural world. Mamae's letters relate incidents from his early life prior to Christianity and his service as a pastor, community leader and spokesperson, tribal historian and planter. By also drawing on other contemporary sources a more complete portrait can be painted of Mamae as a leader and scholar who helped sustain the ancestral knowledge underpinning Mangaia's society as it faced the challenges of the colonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the theology of martyrdom, both Catholic and Protestant, and argues that in the 18th century there was a Protestant belief that knowledge of the Pacific Islands had been withheld from Europeans so that the work of the original apostles could be resumed, and that, as in apostolic times, martyrs were 'the seed of the church'. John Williams, the first Protestant martyr of Melanesia, consciously prepared himself for martyrdom and set the pattern for Samoan and Cook Islander missionary martyrs and other European martyrs who followed. The reasons why the missionaries were killed, when known, are discussed and mostly fall short of the classical definition of martyrdom though it was acceptable to Protestants that they had died while attempting to introduce Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine the story of the American Baptists and how their mission activities in the Naga Hills District (1871–1955) have impacted upon present day politics in the Indian state of Nagaland. Baptists make up nearly 95% of the current Naga population in Nagaland. The paper will investigate the relationship between the Baptist mission's philosophy on education, Christian conversion and the subsequent rise of a sense of 'national community' amongst the Nagas. Although the primary motivation for the American missionaries was to convert, the British administrators also thought that introducing Christianity would prevent influence on these tribes from Hindu and Muslim groups. Thus began Christianity's part in a developing framework for resistance in this region, raising significant questions with regard to Christianity's persistence as a form of political articulation in contemporary Nagaland. This political articulation, I suggest, is related to a greater sense of agency brought about by Christianity and Missionary activities in the fields of education and print. The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (ABFMS) was at the forefront of these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the multiple orientalist expressions that flowed from British pens in nineteenth century Sri Lanka are of use to the scholar of Buddhism, in that they can not only shed light on the growth of Buddhist modernism and the use of the term 'meditation' within it, but also on Sri Lankan Buddhist practice on the ground. It first surveys the preconceptions of the British about the concept of 'meditation'. It then examines the writings of a representative selection of scholar civil servants and Christian missionaries who were resident in Sri Lanka within the century. This data reveal that a vibrant culture of Buddhist devotion and preaching existed throughout the century, together, among the laity, with the practice of 'meditation' on objects related to insight into reality. Additionally, it suggests that the jhānas, although hard for westerners to understand, were an important part of Buddhist self-understanding. The paper, therefore, argues that the priority given to vipassanā as the essence of meditation within Buddhist Modernism is a reduction of the diversity within traditional practice and a distortion of the traditionally recognised interrelationship between the jhānas and other forms of mental culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legacy of Western Christian missionaries to China during the early twentieth century has often been debated by historians, being judged both positively and negatively. Yet, the truth is usually more complex. In examining the lives of Roderick and Agnes Scott, two American missionaries and educators who were active in Fuzhou from 1916-1949, the historian can see how the interaction between Western Christianity and Chinese culture played out in at least one instance, and observe how one American couple developed a growing affinity for the Chinese people and their culture, which gradually led them to the role of interpreters and advocates on behalf of the Chinese during and following World War II. Yet the papers of Roderick Scott also provide examples of the complex relationship between the Chinese and resident foreigners during these years. They document the rise of anti-foreigner sentiment in the 1920s, the debates over the Sinicization of western institutions in the years that followed, the solidarity displayed by foreign missionaries toward the Chinese during the years of the Sino-Japanese War, and their great reluctance to leave China following the revolution of 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the situation in other African countries where Christian missionaries contributed towards the establishment of colonial rule, in Swaziland, colonisation was not facilitated by Christian missionaries. Instead, it was the establishment of the British colonial presence in Swaziland which facilitated evangelisation especially by the Church of the Nazarene (CON) medical missionaries. Coming to Swaziland in the 1920s - 17 years after the British colonisation of Swaziland - the CON medical missionaries served to heighten the Swazi cultural subjugation by consolidating and legitimising colonial authority through introducing western biomedicine as one of the benefits of civilisation, thus undermining the power and influence of traditional healers, while ensuring British dominance. This paper advances the argument by historians of empire - which states that missionaries were agents of empire - by adding the fact that not all missionaries were involved in initiating colonisation. Instead, in some parts of Africa, colonisation was successfully attained without any missionary assistance. However, medical missionaries became very useful to colonising powers after colonisation, when they fortified and legitimised colonial authority. Furthermore, the paper attempts to demonstrate how the state assisted the CON medical missionaries in evangelisation and how these medical missionaries augmented British colonial authority in Swaziland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In commemoration of the bicentenary of the Cook Islands Christian Church, this report records the circumstances of the establishment of its archives repository at the Church's headquarters in the Takamoa Mission House, Avarua, and the extent of its holdings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reconsiders the development of decentralization/centralization dynamics during the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the Ottoman–Montenegrin borderlands of Northern Albania with particular reference to the Mirdite territory inhabited by Catholic tribes. First, the paper describes the local socio-political system and balance of power in Mirdite territory before the enactment of the Gulhane decree. Secondly, the paper focuses on the developments and changes occurring in this land during the Tanzimat. Interaction, intertwining and overlapping between different strategies and policies are analysed in regard to the relationship between Catholic tribes, missionaries and Ottoman officials. Because of them, the changes and developments in the local administrative system occurring in both the religious and the political dimensions during the last part of the nineteenth century were expressions of the process of decentralization/centralization triggered by Istanbul from the third decade of the nineteenth century on. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion progressed, Japanese Protestants intensified their efforts to take up a leading role in the education of Koreans in colonial Korea and in the metropole wishing to spearhead the assimilation of Koreans. By drawing on the colonial discourses of East Asian unity under Japanese leadership, Protestant churches strove to mediate and facilitate colonial policies in Korea. Yet there were also voices of dissent from prominent Japanese Protestants critical of the assimilation policies implemented by colonial authorities in Korea. This ambivalent stance of Protestantism towards Korea is further complicated by the fact that the Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Tokyo served as an important venue of the Korean Independence Movement. Examining Christian magazines and journals of the time, this paper delves into the contentious debates among Japanese Protestants concerning the Korea Mission and the Japanese government’s strategy of assimilation through education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the long-term effect of Christian missionary exposure on HIV infection and related sexual behaviour in Zambia. I use distance to a historical missionary church and health facility as proxies for missionary exposure. I constructed a geocoded data set combining information on the historical locations of churches and missionary health centres with contemporary individual-level data. I find that individuals who live close to a historical missionary church have a higher likelihood of being infected with HIV. I find no significant effect of proximity to a missionary health centre on HIV. Considering that heterosexual transmission is the main channel of HIV transmission in Zambia, I analyse the effect of missionary exposure on sexual behaviour. The following patterns emerge: individuals who live close to a Protestant church are less likely to engage in premarital sexual abstinence; they also have their first sexual encounter at an earlier age, with the effect being stronger for men than women. Living near a Catholic church is associated with having a higher number of sexual partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early 20th century, Western adventurers sought encounters with and images of Pacific people to entertain white audiences. But they were often reliant on resident European missionaries to facilitate their access to the glamorous Other. Missionaries were themselves also creators of Indigenous representations intended for Western consumption, to raise support for their enterprise. This paper examines the uneasy relationship between these groups by bringing together archival resources from disparate disciplines – colonial-era adventure-travelogue and mission history – to uncover an unacknowledged relationship between the American film-maker and photographer Martin Johnson and Australian Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in Vanuatu between 1917 and 1920. My focus is a Big Nambas village on Malakula, Vanuatu, which found itself the nexus of conflicting colonial gazes. Representations of its headman Nihapat, refracted through the lenses of a travelogue-adventurer and the narratives of missionaries, highlight Indigenous agency as he and his people contended with their predicament under colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to examine the importance of rice-beer (zao) amongst the Zeme Nagas of Assam. Colonial officials and Christian missionaries brought new ideas into Zeme social and cultural practices, quite different from their own. One way to frame this interaction is to examine the tension between world-views held by indigenous religions and Christianity, and what this tension represents for the Zeme. I aim to demonstrate how the terms ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ can be understood by examining the position of rice-beer in Zeme society. I will show how these debates were influenced by nineteenth-century Victorian interlocutors, and equally how local discourses have appropriated these colonial concepts as a point of leverage for internal social dynamics in contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alarmed by the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust, a Finnish female missionary in relatively peaceful Jerusalem developed an idea for an ecumenical Hebrew Christian centre that would care for refugee Jewish children, and, which through education and a scientific centre, would advance the evangelization of the Jews in Palestine. Using the archival and published materials of Aili Havas and the Finnish mission, this paper studies the evolution and eventual failure of the plan. It also discusses the difficulties of cooperation between Protestant missions and their shifting theological opinions about missionizing the persecuted Jews, as well as the combination of Christianity, gender, relief and development as a powerful motivator for action, particularly during turbulent historical moments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper employs the letters, journals and books written by representatives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) - charged with establishing a mission to Uganda - to explore the ways in which missionary discourses were framed by, and contributed to, contemporary debates over tropical acclimatization and healthiness of place. Attention first focuses on the degree to which advice produced for and by pioneering missionaries travelling to Uganda reflected prevailing Western stereotypes of the tropics as pestilential and hazardous for European constitutions. Attention then turns to the means through which missionaries' interactions with the on-the-ground environments and pre-existing indigenous knowledge systems and practices may have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the salubrity of the region, and further posited Uganda as a relatively healthful place. The role that missionaries and local assistants across Uganda played in the investigation of a series of climate and disease events which affected the broader East African region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century will then be illustrated. Finally, the degree to which a series of climatic, pathological and ecological events around the turn of the twentieth century, coupled with colonial intervention, may have exacerbated the spread of epidemic disease, specifically trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), will be elucidated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Anglican mission archive material to uncover the extent to which girls' schooling in early nineteenth-century West Africa developed as a response to male interests and perceived male needs. The founding of the colony of Sierra Leone in 1787 as a home for freed slaves followed by the arrival of Protestant missionaries in 1804 offers a laboratory type environment to trace the development of girls' formal schooling in Africa. In particular, the missionaries understood the importance of educating women if Christianity was to prosper on the continent. Girls were to be educated to take their place in the new Christian monogamous family, to provide moral and practical support for men, and to bring up their children in the new faith. They were to be taught separately from boys where possible, by female teachers and with a differentiated curriculum dominated by sewing. Educational opportunities were expanded only insofar as women needed to provide fitting and accomplished marriage companions for educated men seeking to advance their careers in the new meritocratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to trace the development of Protestant missionary publishing in 19th-century China, the considerable impact this had on the elite group of Chinese scholars and how this influence gave rise to modern Chinese "elite" journalism. It focuses particularly on the case of Wanguo Gongbao, the most influential Protestant periodical in the 19th century. Through examining Wanguo Gongbao's secular content, the article demonstrates l iberal Protestant journalists' broad social, political and cultural concerns and their aim to influence the Chinese literati. Following this, the periodical's connections with the emergent political press - XunHuan Daily edited by Wang Tao, Shiwu Bao by Liang Qichao - are explored to reveal the guiding role of Wanguo Gongbao on Chinese elite journalism. The rapid spread of such independent newspapers associated with the reform movement at the end of the 19th century is described. The paper concludes with a critical analysis of the Protestant press as one significant source of the contemporary context of Chinese journalistic culture and the lessons this may hold for us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the broader context of missionary activity during the period of colonialism and post-colonialism, this contribution explores the relationship between Christian mission and Israel as a modern Jewish democratic nation-state. After the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948, some Protestant churches and missionary organisations continued to seek conversions of Jews to Christianity. The State of Israel has officially opposed proselytising among Israeli Jews yet wished to maintain the commitment to freedom of religion stated in its Declaration of Independence. It has also sought not to damage relations with 'Christian' nations, to minimise the harm resulting from historical hostility towards Jews, and to reinforce positive trends within Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism and the Jewish State. We focus on the years 1966–1978, and consider the attitudes of Israeli NGOs to the mission as well as the Israeli Knesset's numerous attempts to enact laws to prevent missionary activity, plus efforts to prevent missionaries from entering the country and to ban Jewish pupils from attending Christian schools. We can conclude by pointing to the persistent tension between the democratic character of the Jewish state and its wish to protect Jews from the perceived spiritual and physical harm of Christian proselytising activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the pioneer missionaries sent in 1872 to the mainland of Papua (New Guinea) from the London Missionary Society base at Rarotonga (Cook Islands) was Rau of Aitutaki. His vernacular report is the earliest record written by a Pacific missionary to Papua, containing otherwise unrecorded events that complement the accounts of British missionaries. An intertextual reading clarifies the circumstances of the first mission settlement at Manumanu, countering criticisms made by Captain Moresby, and also shows that Rau acted as a spokesman and interpreter for the missionaries and was their source of various ethnographic and linguistic data. Rau's document reveals how a Pacific emissary thought, taught and acted among the Motu villages and beyond. His journal is replete with incidents and calamities, village names and populations, encounters on a voyage of exploration, and observations on the activities and status of women, creating a record of historical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the history of the Pacific Theological College (PTC) memorial chapel, the Cook Islands Christian Church archives, and the martyrdom of Cook Islands missionaries.

Papeiha's manuscript, which Mata Tumu-Makara introduces, translates, and annotates, is a historically important example of a very early Indigenous Pacific voice in a region where Christianity remains an intensely lived experience for most people. Makara's work contributes to an understanding of the divergent meanings of 'mission' and 'missionary' by identifying a critical moment in the contemporary history of evangelism in the Pacific when Maeliau's prophetic movement challenged established evangelical practices. Although the Deep Sea Canoe has not yet been relaunched from the Cook Islands, Makara's work makes a major contribution to the focus on the history of Cook Islander missionaries and their families, a theme of the CICC bicentenary celebrations that is celebrated in this special issue of JPH, the CICC Newsletter and the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), Special Collections, blog series, Cook Islander missionaries: recovering hidden histories from missionary archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking better understanding of the Rarotongan church, training institution, and mission background shaping Cook Islander missionaries to Papua New Guinea in the 1870s, this article surveys Pacific Islanders' methodologies in establishing the Cook Islands Church, before focusing on 1867–77 when James and Jane Chalmers served as London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries at Takamoa Institution, and Joseph Mullens steered LMS work globally. By exploring church and missionary interactions in church life, general education, the Takamoa Institution, relations with community leaders on societal issues, and on islands staffed solely by Cook Islanders, the article traces Chalmers's understanding of the gospel's missionary nature, of Cook Islanders' competence controlling their own affairs, and of churches supporting local leaders for community independence. With Mullens's wholehearted support, Chalmers promoted such understanding for further mission and Pacific missionary training. The article concludes that during this decade, the Rarotonga church developed a legacy for future generations to embrace and sustain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Finnish Pentecostals' impact to the world missions has traditionally not been very well known. However it is now touching 60 nations with 345 long term workers as well as annually with 400-500 short termers. The goal has been to have one missionary per one hundred believers (about 140 now). This study paper reflects and analyses the development of the Finnish Pentecostal mission from the Azusa type of spontaneous mission movement almost one hundred years ago to the well structured mission body today. The paradigm shifts have led from sodality to modality, and finally to sodality in modality, from traditional mission society to local church centred mission, and eventually to the well defined cooperation unit of the mission organization and local churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using ethnographic data from the Marshall Islands, I argue that clashing identities may give rise to paradoxical belief systems. Marshall Islanders consider themselves both authentically Marshallese and devoutly Christian, causing a schism of belief and identity that is most starkly visible in historical narratives. When asked generally about the past, locals describe a utopia of traditional peace; but when asked specifically about life before Christian missionaries arrived, locals describe a dystopia of heathen barbarism. Interviewees are usually unable to reconcile these two accounts, showing that they are as paradoxical to locals as they are to outsiders. Researchers who are desirous of tidy analyses or wary of implying that their informants are irrational may downplay such dilemmas in the societies they study. Yet, far from demonstrating the futility of analysis, admitting the existence of contradiction in social life allows for a richer and more insightful view of culture, religion, belief and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first encounters between Aborigines and Europeans in south-eastern Australia were constrained by profound social and linguistic barriers, but they did provide opportunities for cultural exchange. This article argues that important evidence is contained in linguistic materials compiled by missionaries for the purposes of evangelisation and scripture translation. It interprets the linguistic work of Lancelot Threlkeld (1788-1859), who conducted a mission on behalf of London Missionary Society and, later, the government of New South Wales, to the 'Awabakal' or Kuri people of the Hunter River and Lake Macquarie region from 1824-1841, and William Watson (1798-1866) and James Gunther (1806-1879) of the Church Missionary Society, whose mission was to the Wiradhurri people of Wellington Valley, NSW, from 1832 to 1843, as sources for life on the colonial frontier. It argues that linguistic sources provide a unique insight, expressed in languages now extinguished, into the conversations conducted by missionaries on issues such as language difficulties, the nature of the soul, spiritual beings, death, violence and the disintegration of traditional society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nineteenth-century missionary enterprise in the United States was given an enduring African dimension when six men and their families left for Southern Africa in 1834. Here they succeeded in establishing missions stations along the eastern coastline of Natal, where their main objective was to convert the Zulu king Dingaan and establish self-supporting indigenous churches among his people. Motivated in part by guilt over complicity in slavery, but also by a burning desire to save the heathen world, the missionaries carried with them a view of Africa that would be severely challenged by their new converts. There was a distinct lack of urgency to establish a native ministry, despite the principle of self-government which was consistently upheld as critical for successful missions. Africans were considered to be living in the muck and mire of sin, with no moral backbone, and having no conception of a God. How American missionaries in Africa, then, might have contributed to the mythological world of make-believe that characterized so much of the propaganda of Christian missions is the subject of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Images of Chinese children generated by Christian missionaries played an important role in shaping American perceptions of China in the first half of the twentieth century. This article draws upon the recently-digitized Passionist China Collection of missionary photographs in order to discuss the importance of orphan imagery to mission fundraising, missionary approaches to children, and the establishment of sentimental bonds between missionaries, the Chinese, and American mission supporters. By examining "pagan baby" campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s which urged American Catholics to contribute to the care of a faraway Chinese orphan, this article attempts to frame the historical meaning of Chinese orphan imagery, the circumstances of missionary cultural production, and the various cultural, social, and economic functions served by these images. Through the circulation of their images in missionary magazines and beyond, Chinese orphans emerged as familiar figures that came to exemplify ideas of American benevolence and cross-cultural sympathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent past, governance reforms in India have resulted in the government and corporate sectors making serious efforts to enhance and showcase their accountability to their principals, namely citizens and shareholders. Similarly, NGOs have been pushed to demonstrate their accountability to multiple stakeholders, namely donors, communities and most importantly, the state. This viewpoint highlights this transition and also reflects on the changing contours of NGO accountability debates in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the personal missionary experience of an African American woman physician, Dr Georgia Ester Lee Patton (1864-1900), later known as Georgia Washington. Patton worked in Liberia, a unique setting for missionary activities, being a colony established by former American slaves. The primary resource materials used here are missionary photographic archives, which comprise a distinct category of colonial cultural production. Photography assisted missions in promoting western achievements, disseminating Christianity, and advancing progress, by exposing Africans to western civilization. Such imagery was largely created by European photographers working within the social milieu of missionary organizations. Missionary photographs, therefore, functioned as an official public record of the missionary enterprise; today they are invaluable records of the histories of Christian missions around the globe. Missionary archives exist as both public and private archives. Private archives, as opposed to the images planned for a public audience, were compiled by individual missionaries and intended for private viewings. For this case study I use the private archive Patton compiled after she worked as a medical missionary in Liberia between 1893 and 1895. Patton later returned to Tennessee, where she became the first woman physician in the city of Memphis. This article seeks to determine how Patton’s perception of herself as an African American, as a woman, as a Christian, and as a physician influenced her unusual experience as a medical missionary in late nineteenth-century West Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theological misappropriation of Christianity as a civilizing force occurs when individuals convert to Christianity due to deception that ignores the faith-based aspect of Christianity. The history of Western education in India illustrates the hidden curriculum that Christian missionaries employed to disrupt the Indian educational system. This unnerving pedagogy points to the need for a postcolonial theoretical framework that relates the inescapable hybridity of religion and culture where Orientalism has the potential to occur. To press the ongoing urgency of this discussion, I convey how the history of British India connects to my lived-reality as an American Hindu. Overall, I point to hybridity as a lived paradox of ambiguous conflict that embraces interfaith relations. I offer implications for Christian missionaries today to foster authentic interfaith connections without engaging in colonizing ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For decades, scholars have debated whether Protestant Christian missionaries who travelled from Europe and North America to the colonized world were essentially 'evangelists of empire' or whether they rather served to undermine the logic and operations of colonial rule. In this essay I examine some of the major positions within the debate in the Indian context and argue that these are sometimes fraught by superficial representations of colonial power relations in the subcontinent. Using examples from the Danish evangelical mission's activities in late colonial South India, I suggest that to better understand the missionaries' variable roles in the 'imperial social formation' we need to reorient our critical attention and explore new research trajectories. Not only must we disassemble the analytical categories of colonizer and colonized, we must also take into account the missionaries' part in hierarchically entangled histories in a way that goes beyond an analytical framework of 'metropole and colony'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic shipping at the turn of the twentieth century the male exchange economy vanished and female literacy acquired a vital new importance in the creation and maintenance of an empathy economy with the Atlantic mainlands generating the manufactured imports essential to the colony’s survival. The low literacy level and new dependence for subsistence on writing undermined the patriarchal authority of ‘headmen’ and gave a small group of female amanuenses effective political power on the island. The latter worked hard to maintain their newfound power by thwarting repeated metropolitan attempts to spread literacy or socialise the island economy and fostering fear and ignorance of the outside world among the islanders. The profoundly conservative and even oppressive nature of ‘functional literacy’ on Tristan da Cunha in the first half of the twentieth century provides a corrective to the emancipatory claims made for ‘tin trunk literacy’ elsewhere in the global south. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the previously understudied issue of protection within Christian missions, deepening the understanding of gender as a central factor in how protection has been understood in mission work. It takes four Scandinavian female missionaries, working as YWCA secretaries in Changsha, as its starting point for a discussion of perceptions of protection in times of unrest. The analysis spans the years 1917–1927, a politically turbulent period in the history of Hunan, with recurring outbursts of violence and increasing anti-foreign sentiments. During these periods of unrest, missionaries were put in positions in which they had to act not only as social and spiritual evangelists of the Christian gospel but also as security providers. This article investigates the complexity of perceptions of protection within discursive structures of gender and the ways in which the women navigated prevailing structures to provide protection for people they cared about and to attain influence over situations in which their control was endangered. The analysis focuses on the use of protective symbols, on the mission site as both protected and threatened space, and on the female missionary as both protecting guardian and in need of protection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the Swedish-American Baptist Minnie Johnson Hanson, who worked among the Kachins of Northern Burma from 1890 to 1928. Through a biographical reconstruction and analysis of Hanson’s contexts, it argues that Hanson was a figure of some significance in literary work, education and medical work among the Kachins. In contrast to the agenda of the mission to ‘civilize’, development needs to be indigenized through the analysis of indigenous researchers. The writer pleads for translocal developmental analysis – the comparison of ethnic groups in adjacent spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between the War of 1812 and the emergence of a self-sufficient Canadian Methodism in the 1850s, the combination of geopolitical instability, transatlantic evangelicalism, indigenous and settler enthusiasm for religious revival, and the ideas of romantic nationalism produced a distinctly Ojibwe Christianity. This Christianity is known to us primarily through the letters, journals, and publications of a small group of Algonquian-speaking intellectuals educated in American colleges who mobilized the ideology and institutional networks of the Protestant missionary project to mount a vigorous challenge to the encroachments of settler colonialism occurring on both sides of the Great Lakes. Ojibwe Christians participated in a movement to transform the world into a multiracial Christian commonwealth, a movement within which they could remain committed to a historiographical and nation-building project meant to establish an autonomous, or at least semi-autonomous, Indian polity within the imperialist state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary interest in the black African middle class requires holistic attention to how this class has developed historically. In what follows, the origins of the African middle class are located in the efforts of Christian missionaries to create a literate, ‘civilized’ African elite. The resultant middle class was defined by its employment in professional, service and clerical spheres, and was noted for its orientation towards material improvement. However, confronted by racial barriers which stunted its opportunities for upward mobility, the African middle class played a key role in the establishment of the African National Congress (ANC). Although significant debate attends the extent to which middle-class leaders of the ANC connected with the masses during the inter-war years, there is strong for backing for the claim that the radicalization of the movement in the 1950s saw middle-class elements move into political alliance with the black working class. Thereafter, however, the banning of the liberation movements 1960 led the African middle class to lapse into political quiescence, although some of them pursued the limited advances offered by the bantustan programme. In turn, these were to be overtaken by political developments of the 1980s alongside accompanying reformist efforts to promote a collaborationist middle class within African urban communities. Ironically, this paved the way for the African middle class to line up behind the ANC, and for the ANC to become a predominantly middle class formation after 1994. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conversion of Scotland, in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, was carried out largely by Gaelic-speaking missionaries from Ireland. When Scotland was largely Gaelic-speaking it was freely acknowledged that the conversion had come mainly from Ireland. But in the later Middle Ages, as Gaelic retreated from the Lowlands and became increasingly seen there as barbaric and uncivilised, new historical models were developed in Scottish hagiography which portrayed missionaries as civilised Lowlanders penetrating and pacifying the barbaric Highlands. In the course of this process the ancient Picts disappeared from view. This rewriting of history could not overcome the known facts about St Columba, however, and on the eve of the Reformation Roderick MacLean, a Gaelic-speaking bishop (with Lutheran sympathies), wrote elaborate and sophisticated Latin poems proclaiming the achievements of Columba and Iona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From providing the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter to facilitating travel for those seeking refuge, decentralized underground Christian networks in China have assisted countless undocumented North Korean migrants in situations both dire and desperate. However, with no systems for transparency or accountability in place, and with conservative religious agendas structuring spaces of aid and advocacy, these networks also produce troubling paradigms of custodial confinement and discipline. Drawing on field research in the United States, South Korea, and China, this article examines the way a Christian missionary safe house in China illustrates a political theology of custody through its employment of care and control as well as its attention to and detention of vulnerable populations. The author shows that missionaries justify their custodial authority by stressing good intentions and a pastoral prerogative, but deny the unequal power relations that undergird the very structure of their missionary activities for undocumented North Korean migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a case of alleged sexual abuse, by a missionary, of a number of missionary daughters in the South Seas mission. The rich material connected with this case allows for a powerful insight into the fabric of life of missionaries and their children, and illuminates various levels of moral scrutiny and social supervision that were embedded in the mission context. Parental moral scrutiny was the most effective mechanism to neutralise the internal threat posed by the potential deviance of missionary children. The levels of moral scrutiny in the mission were unevenly implemented, however, and the asymmetry of scrutiny that occurred (whereby missionary children were subjected to intense social and moral supervision, while missionaries themselves were permitted a certain level of deviation from spiritual and cultural norms) reflected the hierarchies of power and social dynamics of the mission context. This case led to the systemisation and legitimisation of both these scrutinies and these asymmetries, while further implementing new levels of social control, directed both at the behaviour of missionary children and the efficiency of parental moral scrutiny enacted by their parents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The killing of the first Bishop of Melanesia, John Coleridge Patteson, in 1871, on tiny Nukapu island in the Reef Islands of what today is the Temotu Province of Solomon Islands, is a central event in the mission history of the Western Pacific and continues to be a key narrative within Anglican Melanesia. In the standard explanations, Patteson's killing was retaliation for the alleged kidnapping of five Nukapu men by labour traders. Here, this interpretation is questioned. By scrutinising written representations of the event, we endorse the argument that key personnel of the Melanesian Mission used the incident in a political struggle against the labour trade. By juxtaposing the various versions from published and archival sources with two contemporary accounts, obtained during recent linguistic fieldwork on Nukapu proper and elsewhere in Temotu, we identify what Bronwen Douglas has termed 'indigenous countersigns' and suggest other explanations for the killing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a personal letter, written by Sioasi (George) Tāufa 'āhau, King of Tonga, for Wesleyan missionary Reverend Charles Tucker, along with commentary. The letter is part of the personal collection of Bradley J. Payne. Both Tongan and English versions of the letter are included, along with photographic images of the original document. In the letter, the king describes a visit to Samoa, and is critical of the tensions between the Wesleyan Missionary Committee and the London Missionary Society (LMS) in that country. The author of the commentary believes this letter demonstrates the proliferation of literacy among Tongans in the 19th century due to missionary activities.

The scholarly analysis of missionary lives as 'windows' on the colonial world's experiences for a variety of people has become a well-established trend in Cape history in recent years. Due to his extensive participation in the London Missionary Society's activities in the Cape Colony over the crucial decades of the early nineteenth century, Revd James Read has become a central person in the related historiography. As such, he is no longer a peripheral figure in the mission history narratives of this particular Society's prolific work, having emerged from the shadows of the likes of Dr Johannes van der Kemp and Revd John Philip to a far more prominent position. This trend was arguably set in motion by Christopher Saunders's groundbreaking article of 1976: 'James Read: Towards a Reassessment'. However, the impact of the 'new mission history' on perceptions of Read's role has not as yet been traced. This article, therefore, puts forward a new reassessment of both the biographical and historiographical treatment afforded Read in the thirty-year period since Saunders's article. Given the ongoing academic interest shown in the actions and agencies of mission residents in response to missionary agendas and ideals, this article will also argue for a further historical realignment of 'Read the character'. With a view to future research, my aim here is to begin to position Read as an influential 'agent of change' for groups seeking alternatives to their social statuses of marginalisation and interstitiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]