The British Empire, colonialism, and missionary activity

Abstract

Christian missionary activity was central to the work of European colonialism, providing British missionaries and their supporters with a sense of justice and moral authority. Throughout the history of imperial expansion, missionary proselytising offered the British public a model of ‘civilised’ expansionism and colonial community management, transforming imp-erial projects into moral allegories. Missionary activity was, however, unavoidably implicated in either covert or explicit cultural change. It sought to transform indigenous communities into imperial archetypes of civility and modernity by remodelling the individual, the community, and the state through western, Christian philosophies. In the British Empire, and particularly in what is historically known as the ‘second’ era of British imperialism (approximately 1784–1867), missionary activity was frequently involved with the initial steps of imperial expansion. A heightened sense of religiosity in Britain at this time ensured that Christianisation was seen as a crucial part of the colonising and civilising projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Jamie Scott notes, ‘by the middle of the nineteenth century, under the double aegis of “the bible and the flag”, governments, merchants, explorers, and other adventurers were exploiting the aura of ethical responsibility lent by religion to every effort to carry British civilisation to a benighted world’. Whilst earlier European empires (such as the Spanish and Portuguese) had spread Catholicism, Protestant churches had traditionally been too deeply divided to make any commitment to overseas missions.