Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England.

Elbourne, Elizabeth ; Colwill, Elizabeth

Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England, by Susan Thorne. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1999. 247 pp. $49.50 U.S.

The history of missions has not been extensively integrated into the larger "domestic" history of Britain, despite a broad and sophisticated historiography in many of the areas which received Christian missionaries. This has reflected the de facto disciplinary separation of British historians into "domestic" and "imperial" varieties which pertained until relatively recently. With gathering momentum in the 1990s, a number of excellent works have begun to piece back together what British contemporaries at any rate would have seen as a contiguous history. Few, however, have tried in as ambitious a fashion as Susan Thorne's fine study, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England, to examine the domestic impact of missions on class formation, ideas about race and gender, and the development of an imperial culture over the nineteenth century as a whole. Thorne's work fills an obvious lacuna in British social history. At the same time, her work is particularly innovative because it recognizes the particularities of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century missionary culture, rather than attempting, as so many works about nineteenth-century evangelicalism do, to read the earlier part of the century through a Victorian lens. A further strength of Thorne's work is that she uses many of the insights and questions of the new cultural history of empire, but in the context of a more textured social history than adopted by scholars more oriented to discourse analysis.

The book focuses on the London Missionary Society, one of the oldest and most important of the nineteenth-century British Protestant missionary societies. The society was founded as an interdenominational body in 1795 in the first flush of evangelical enthusiasm for foreign missions but became a Congregational organ. Despite some attention to denominational specificity, Thorne clearly sees the domestic history of the L.M.S. as representative of much larger processes--above all, the centrality of empire to British society. In Thorne's words, her study aims "to model how we, that is British historians and especially social historians, might go about rethinking our subject from the imperial bottom up" (p. 7).

Thorne argues that the "missionary imperial project" was "central to the construction of Victorian middle-class identity, or at least to one influential version of it" (p. 56). As middle-class dissenters moved in from the outskirts of power, they used mission society platforms to criticise an aristocratic imperial elite and thus to present themselves as virtuous embodiments of the nation as a whole. They were able to use mission societies in this fashion precisely because of the ambiguous relation of missions to empire. Missionaries and mission supporters both criticized imperial (and especially settler) practices and yet presented empire as a potential force for good in the world. Middle-class evangelicals were thus able to present themselves as the "true" representatives of both national and imperial interests. Mission societies further provided a rich form of associational culture for an emergent middle class, while fundraising practices enabled middle class dissenters to establish themselves as patrons of the labouring poor. Similarly, Thorne argues, women used missions in a variety of ways to bolster their own domestic position. Ironically, the late nineteenth-century feminization of the missionary project was enabled in part by the re-conceptualisation of the British "nation" as a racial entity. If early nineteenth century missionaries prioritized conversion over "civilization," late nineteenth-century missionaries and mission supporters increasingly saw missions as a means to civilize a racial other. It was critically important to this endeavour that the middle-class patrons of the L.M.S. also saw the British working class as a "racial" group in need of civilization.

These are stimulating and important arguments. They are not uncontroversial. The very ambition of the book coupled with its confinement to a mere 170 pages of text (the product of publishing exigencies?) sometimes compels oversimplification. I myself wanted more on the lived material reality of class. In what sense did the "middle class' which was involved in missionary activity exist in the 1890s in a way in which it didn't in the 1790s? Had it "made" itself by coming to self-consciousness and claiming political power predicated on certain rhetorical claims about middle-class virtue? Or is it rather that a larger number of evangelicals were themselves concretely richer and of higher social status? I suspect that Thorne means the former, but she might usefully discuss in parallel changes in material experience which in turn influenced the uses made of evangelicalism. Whatever Thorne may mean by that vexed and much-debated term "class," her model is arguably too static. For example, ambiguity around the class status of people on the fringes of the middling world, such as respectable artisans, drove much of the social anxiety and obsession with respectability of mission supporters and missionaries from that background. Perhaps missions were also a route to the "making" of the middle-class through the public performance of respectability by those on the margins of middle-class status? At the other social extreme, there were powerful aristocratic patrons of mission whom Thorne might also have examined.

Thorne writes in an emergent feminist tradition, exemplified by the work of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, which ties evangelicalism to the self-definition of an increasingly powerful middle class, in need of working-class and imperial others to define and patronize. This model has some difficulty, however, with evangelicalism as a form of popular culture, or indeed as a cross-class cultural form. It seems too simplistic to describe the prime movers and directors of the L.M.S. as (active) middle class and its missionaries and local supporters as (acted-upon) working class. Congregations had more autonomy under the congregational tradition than that. Eighteenth-century methodism was also messier and less well-defined than Thorne implies. She exaggerates the influence of John Wesley on popular evangelicalism and downplays international influences on the British evangelical revival. By seeing methodism as more top-down and more focussed than it really was, Thorne underestimates the vitality and agency of local religious groups. This in turn leads her to underestimate the contribution of "working-class" evangelicals to the early missionary movement. In practice, missionary society organizers needed a very wide network of local volunteers. This need was particularly acute in the years of the war with France during which, as Thorne emphasizes, evangelicals were widely seen as dangerous "enthusiasts." I agree with Thorne that middle-class mission organizers increasingly distanced themselves from the working-class congregations from whom they solicited funds in a patronizing manner, but this was a denial of the importance of popular religion to the movement in the first place. Surely there were local complications as a result?

Finally, I am not convinced that the fact that late eighteenth-century evangelicals described "darkest" England in the same terms as "darkest Africa" proves unequivocally that middle-class perception of the working classes were already "raced." This is a compelling argument, particularly for the Victorian era, and clearly the concepts of race and class are as deeply intertwined as Thorne argues. Nonetheless, a number of missionaries in Africa turned the argument on its head and used these parallels to argue that perceived racial differences were unreal. The language of darkness was thoroughly evangelical and was freely deployed by at least some working-class evangelicals about their own communities. Here I think Thorne underestimates the independent power of religious language and the importance of sheer religious prejudice between Christians in the eighteenth century.

It is not surprising, however, that as dense, creative and intelligent a book as this one provides matter for debate. This is an important, even groundbreaking, work. It deserves a wide readership.

Elizabeth Elbourne

McGill University