Baptists, Race and Empire, 1792–1914

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article compares the stances on race and empire of four British who featured in the overseas missionary movement in this period. William Ward of the Serampore Mission brought some elements of his early political radicalism into his attack on Hinduism as a system of priestly oppression. The writer and BMS secretary Edward Bean Underhill blamed the Jamaican plantocracy for the plight of the former slaves after emancipation, and defended black Jamaicans against racist attacks on their character. In contrast, Herbert Sutton Smith, a BMS missionary on the Congo from 1899 to 1910, wrote a book about his years at Yakusu that is full of racial stereotypes. Finally, Joseph Booth, a Baptist from Derby who began his own self-supporting mission in Malawi in 1892, became an outspoken critic of British involvement in the region, while still retaining a theoretical hope that Queen Victoria would intervene on behalf of exploited Africans.