Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 38)

Anna Johnston analyses missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnston argues that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, caught between imperial and religious interests. She maps out this position through an examination of texts published by missionaries of the largest, most influential nineteenth-century evangelical institution, the London Missionary Society. These texts provide a fascinating commentary on nineteenth-century evangelism and colonialism, and illuminate complex relationships between white imperial subjects, white colonial subjects, and non-white colonial subjects. With their reformist, and often prurient interest in sexual and familial relationships, missionary texts focused imperial attention on gender and domesticity in colonial cultures. Johnston contends that in doing so they rewrote imperial expansion as a moral allegory and confronted British ideologies of gender, race and class. Texts from Indian, Polynesian and Australian missions are examined to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relation to gender, colonialism and race.

Arguing that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, Anna Johnson analyzes missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnson reveals how missionaries were caught between imperial and religious interests through an examination of texts published by the largest and most influential nineteenth-century evangelical institution, the London Missionary Society. Texts from Indian, Polynesian, and Australian missions are also examined to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relationship to gender, colonialism, and race.

Johnston analyses missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire and argues that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, caught between religious and imperial interests 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.

johnston Analyses Missionary Writing Under The Aegis Of The British Empire.