Empires of Religion

356 Pages·2008·4.518 MB·English

by  Hilary M. Carey (eds.)

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series
General Editors: Megan Vaughan, Kings’ College, Cambridge and Richard
Drayton, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
This informative series covers the broad span of modern imperial history while
also exploring the recent developments in former colonial states where residues
of empire can still be found. The books provide in-depth examinations of
empires as competing and complementary power structures encouraging the
reader to reconsider their understanding of international and world history
during recent centuries.
Titles include:
Sunil S. Amrith
DECOLONIZING INTERNATIONAL HEALTH
India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65
Tony Ballantyne
ORIENTALISM AND RACE
Aryanism in the British Empire
Robert J. Blyth
THE EMPIRE OF THE RAJ
Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947
Roy Bridges (editor)
IMPERIALISM, DECOLONIZATION AND AFRICA
Studies Presented to John Hargreaves
L.J. Butler
COPPER EMPIRE
Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c.1930–64
Hilary M. Carey (editor)
EMPIRES OF RELIGION
T.J. Cribb (editor)
IMAGINED COMMONWEALTH
Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English
Michael S. Dodson
ORIENTALISM, EMPIRE AND NATIONAL CULTURE
India, 1770–1880
B.D. Hopkins
THE MAKING OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN
Ronald Hyam
BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL CENTURY, 1815–1914
A Study of Empire and Expansion
Third Edition
Robin Jeffrey
POLITICS, WOMEN AND WELL-BEING
How Kerala became a ‘Model’
Gerold Krozewski
MONEY AND THE END OF EMPIRE
British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947–58
Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (editors)
PSYCHIATRY AND EMPIRE
Javed Majeed
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAVEL AND POST-NATIONAL IDENTITY
Francine McKenzie
REDEFINING THE BONDS OF COMMONWEALTH 1939–1948
The Politics of Preference
Gabriel Paquette
ENLIGHTENMENT, GOVERNANCE AND REFORM IN SPAIN
AND ITS EMPIRE 1759–1808
John Singleton and Paul Robertson
ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN BRITAIN AND
AUSTRALASIA 1945–1970
Kim A. Wagner (editor)
THUGGEE
Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India
Jon E. Wilson
THE DOMINATION OF STRANGERS
Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series
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Empires of Religion
Edited By
Hilary M. Carey
Professor of History, University of Newcastle, NSW
© Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Hilary M. Carey 2008
All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-20880-3
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Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Preface viii
Notes on Contributors x
1 Introduction: Empires of Religion 1
Hilary M. Carey
Part I Religious Metropoles
2 The Consolidation of Irish Catholicism within a
Hostile Imperial Framework: A Comparative Study of
Early Modern Ireland and Hungary 25
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
3 Anti-Catholicism and the British Empire, 1815–1914 43
John Wolffe
4 An Empire of God or of Man? The Macaulays,
Father and Son 64
Catherine Hall
5 Religious Literature and Discourses of Empire: The Scottish
Presbyterian Foreign Mission Movement 84
Esther Breitenbach
Part II Colonies and Mission Fields
Greater Britain: Whiteness and its Limits
6 ‘Making Black Scotsmen and Scotswomen?’ Scottish
Missionaries and the Eastern Cape Colony in the
Nineteenth Century 113
John MacKenzie
7 Archbishop Vaughan and the Empires of Religion in
Colonial New South Wales 137
Peter Cunich
v
vi Contents
8 ‘Brighter Britain’: Images of Empire in the International
Child Rescue Movement, 1850–1915 161
Shurlee Swain
9 Saving the ‘Empty North’: Religion and Empire
in Australia 177
Anne O’Brien
Part II Colonies and Mission Fields
Friends of the Native? Universalism and Its Limits
10 ‘The Sharer of My Joys and Sorrows’: Alison Blyth,
Missionary Labours and Female Perspectives on Slavery
in Nineteenth-Century Jamaica 199
John McAleer
11 R ichard Taylor and the Children of Noah: Race, Science
and Religion in the South Seas 222
Peter Clayworth
12 F rom African Missions to Global Sisterhood: The
Mothers’ Union and Colonial Christianity, 1900–1930 243
Elizabeth E. Prevost
Part III Post-Colonial Transformations
13 I reland’s Spiritual Empire: Territory and Landscape in
Irish Catholic Missionary Discourse 267
Fiona Bateman
14 Canadian Protestant Overseas Missions to the
Mid-Twentieth Century: American Influences, Interwar
Changes, Long-Term Legacies 288
Ruth Compton Brouwer
15 Empire and Religion in Colonial Botswana: The Seretse
Khama Controversy, 1948–1956 311
John Stuart
Select Bibliography 333
Index 339
Abbreviations
BBC British broadcasting Corporation
BCC British Council of Churches
BWM Board of World Mission
CBMS Conference of British Missionary Societies
CMAI Christian Medical Association of India
CMC Christian Medical College
CRO Commonwealth Relations Office
CUSO Canadian University Service Overseas
DWO Division of World Outreach
EMMS Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society
FMCNA Foreign Missions Conference of North America
GAA Gaelic Athletic Association
GEB General Education Board
GMS Glasgow Missionary Society
IAI International African Institute
ICCLA International Committee on Christian Literature for
Africa
IMC International Missionary Council
IPF Imperial Protestant Federation
LMS London Missionary Society
MU Mothers’ Union
NCC National Christian Council
SCM Students Christian Movement
SMS Scottish Missionary Society
SPG Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
UCD University College Dublin
UN United Nations
UPC United Presbyterian Church
WCC World Council of Churches
WFMS Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society
WSCF World Student Christian Federation
vii
Preface
When I visited Dublin for the first time at the end of 2004, it was at the
beginning of a two-year term as Keith Cameron Professor of Australian
History at University College Dublin. As the Aircoach made its slow
progress across the city from north to south towards UCD, I made note
of the landmarks as they materialized through the window. The tourist
sites were familiar enough from picture books and my hasty and imper-
fect historical reading: there was O’Connell Street, named after the
nationalist leader; now we were passing the GPO, the main scene of the
Easter Rising of 1916; the River Liffey looked much smaller than I was
expecting, and Trinity College rather larger; why, I wondered, was the
Bank of Ireland housed in such a grand building and why did it appear
to be doing service as a traffic island? Later I would head to the country-
side and tour monasteries, castles and round towers: Glendalough, Trim
and Clonmacnoise. I viewed all these with great interest as one does any
new place, but they felt no more or no less intriguing than, say,
Westminster Abbey, Stonehenge or Edinburgh Castle: they were all bits
of the picturesque British Isles, that in Ireland I was to learn to call
‘these islands’. But passing through St Stephen’s Green, I felt an unex-
pected pang of recognition as we passed the familiar crest and name-
plate of the religious order whose schools I had attended in the Australian
cities of Perth, Melbourne and Sydney during a peripatetic childhood.
A little later, I had another pang as we passed the Mater Hospital – that
must be run by the Sisters of Mercy who had commissioned me to write
the history of their hospital at North Sydney; St Vincent’s must be
another hospital – that would be run by the Sisters of Charity. With
what was probably an over-confident sense of familiarity, I felt sure that
I could anticipate what the function, class and social context of these
institutions and others which I assumed lay scattered through the sub-
urbs. This stemmed in no way from expatriate Irish internationalism,
which for Australians tends to beat with an irregular and unsentimen-
tal pulse: I was a foreigner on my first visit to Ireland; my Irish surname
came courtesy of my husband, the son of Irish emigrants; my mother’s
family, all the Irish blood I could claim, had come to the colony of New
South Wales via India 150 years ago courtesy of the British army; my
father was a New Zealander of Scottish descent. What I was identifying
were not therefore Irish roots but religious ones: Dublin was the template
viii
Preface ix
for the urban and cultural geography of my colonial subculture, a
religious rather than a political or national metropole. What an excel-
lent place, I felt myself decide before we reached UCD in Dublin’s leafy
southern suburbs, to have a conference on religion and imperialism.
More concrete plans for this conference developed in 2005 when
Hugh McLeod visited Sydney to attend the 20th International Congress
of the Historical Sciences during which we participated in a number of
sessions which the Ecclesiastical History Society shared with the
Australia-based Religious History Society. I wanted to ask Anne O’Brien
and Catherine Hall to keynote the conference; Hugh thought this was a
good idea and agreed to invite John MacKenzie and John Wolffe. At
one point we were joined by Andrew Porter, also in Sydney attending
the Congress, in discussing the conference theme, which had begun to
solidify around the idea of ‘Empires of religion’. This sounded impres-
sive, he agreed, ‘but what exactly does it mean?’ This was sobering and
both Hugh and I felt the need to ensure that the conference and this set
of proceedings did not dissolve into the metaphorical mists. We there-
fore decided that the theme of the conference would focus on the forms
of religious imperialism in Britain and the colonies of Greater Britain,
paying less attention to the foreign missionary movement which has its
own vast literature and which there seems no particular need to extend.
Missions have found their way into this volume nonetheless and indeed
it has proven impossible to do imperial religious history without them.
The conference was held at UCD in the Global Irish Institute from
20–21 June 2006. It was made possible with financial support from the
UCD Centre for Australian Studies, the UCD School of History and
Archives, the Micheál Ó Cléirigh Institute and a Discovery grant from
the Australian Research Council. For their contributions to the confer-
ence and/or this volume I thank Hugh McLeod, Kate Breslin, Bernard
Carey, Beatrice Carey, Howard Clarke, Mary Daly, Judith Devlin, Sarah
Feehon, Deana Heath, Brian Jackson, Edward James, Jane Koustas,
Michael Laffan, Emma Lyons, Peter Martin, Susan O’Reilly and the
Australian Ambassador to Dublin, Anne Plunkett. Michael Strang from
Palgrave Macmillan has been supportive since visiting me in Dublin
and expressing interest in the volume. The Palgrave reader made many
useful suggestions, including a plan for the overall arrangement of the
chapters, which I have silently incorporated.
HILARY M. CAREY
University of Newcastle, NSW