Origins of the Anglo-American Missionary Enterprise in China, 1807-1840 (review)

Abstract

Reviews 531 Murray A. Rubinstein. Origins oftheAnglo-American Missionary Enterprise in China, 1807-1840. Lanham and London: Scarecrow Press, 1996. 400 pp. Hardcover $59.50, isbn 0-8108-2770-0. The new China Mission History, begun in the 1970s, has striven for greater objectivity and more theoretical sophistication than was evident in earlier, often hagiographie, works. From these studies developed die paradigm ofdie missionary movement as an international, global enterprise, not entirely dissimilar in its aims and methods to die global business enterprises that emerged in the same era, and with whose pioneer merchants the missions and missionaries often had close personal and economic links. Unlike merchants, however, missionaries were in the "business" of saving souls, and transforming "imperiled heathen nations" into something closer to their Western, and Christian, counterparts. Hence, this global enterprise became a focus for the cultural transformation ofnations, and die missionary functioned as cultural intermediary, something that at that time concerned neidier merchants nor governments. Rubinstein's work follows precisely within this paradigm, turning its detailed gaze on the origins of the Anglo-American Protestant enterprise, and its pioneers, Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and Elijah Coleman Bridgman and others ofthe American Board. The work is primarily narrative, in a Geertzian attempt to elucidate "deep structures" that are intended to "recreate a palpable sense ofplace and time" (p. 8), but diese chapters of"thick descriptions," to follow die Annales school, are informed by three analytic themes or leitmotifs: how a "revitalized" religious consciousness that was trans-Atlantic in scope became an expansionist Evangelical Christianity; the formation ofmission infrastructure and mediodology; and the role ofCanton as gateway to China. There is, I would argue, a fourth focus: Canton and die cities ofthe Nanyang or Southeast Asia—Macao, Penang, Malacca, and Singapore—and their huaqiao, or overseas Chinese populations, which, the author demonstrates convincingly, functioned as a unified entity in the birth of this enterprise. As the gateway to China, Canton—and the rigidities ofthe Canton system of trade and diplomacy—drew the missionaries close to the merchant community and ultimatelyinto a role as China "watchers" and scholars, useful both to the East India Company and to later diplomatic efforts such as the Amherst Mission.© 1998 by University Morrison served as translator for both. Given the Qing prohibition on ChristianofHawai 'i Pressity and on the teaching ofChinese to foreigners, the only work possible for missionaries in pre-Opium War China was to translate Christian literature and to publish and distribute tracts and bibles, a methodology pioneered by Morrison. 532 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 But these same restrictions made even this work easier and more secure in the Nanyang where one could, in addition, actually preach as well. The first AngloChinese College was established in the Nanyang, and Malacca and Singapore became centers for missionary printing presses. Hence the Nanyang became the laboratory and the "staging area for the post-1843 'missionary invasion' of the Chinese mainland" (p. 5). Robert Morrison was the key figure in all this, and Rubinstein's study, after an initial chapter that describes the Canton system at the beginning of the nineteenth century, begins with his early life and background, followed by a detailed description ofhis career. His arrival in Canton in 1807 sets the formal boundary for the China-centered portions of the study, just as the Opium War marks its conclusion, but die elucidation of the religious and cultural context of the Protestant evangelical revival in England and America takes the narrative back into the late eighteenth century. The discussions of Morrison's "conversion" and awakening to the call, coupled with the later discussions ofAmerican evangelical religiosity , are among the finest in the book. The author is wonderful not only at recreating that time and place but, more importantly, at explaining the main themes in the history ofAnglo-American evangelism. Chapter 5 contains a masterful summation of the theological rationale for the American Reformed Protestant missionary enterprise, a theology that spoke to "secular but spiritually centered reform " (p. 203) as well as the urgent need for missions. The core of this theology was a view of the "Millennium as figurative," as the era of...