Reclaiming Savages in ‘Darkest England’ and ‘Darkest India’: The Salvation Army as Transnational Agent of the Civilizing Mission

Abstract

‘What, then, is my scheme? It is a very simple one, although in its ramifications and extensions it embraces the whole world’ —William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out , London, 1890 Introduction It is by now a well established fact that transnational interaction and communication on a global scale is by no means a recent phenomenon. According to prominent historians, such as C. A. Bayly and Jurgen Osterhammel, the intensity of globalizing processes in modern times had reached a first peak by the end of the nineteenth century. As they persuasively demonstrate, this holds true not only for the economic, political, and cultural level, but also for the emerging religious and philanthropic organizations that could be seen as forerunners of today's INGOs. Some scholars have argued that this new type of internationalism carried by organizations and agents belonging to the realm of the civil society was important inasmuch as it was able to ‘challenge state power’, and emphasize its inherent aspirations ‘to a more peaceful and stable world order through transnational efforts’. Building on Kathleen Wilson's important insight showing that the British Empire provides us with a particularly striking example of interdependent sites that ‘allow us to rethink the […] historiographies of national belonging and exclusion’, the present case study tries to question such an hypothesis by analyzing the ideology as well as the practical endeavors of one of the most successful global philanthropic movements in a transnational context: the Salvation Army.