The British Empire and the Missionary Movement

Author(s):  
Adrian Hastings
2006 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-737 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW HOLMES

This article explores the various factors that both encouraged Irish Presbyterian involvement in mission and shaped how they understood their missionary calling. It contributes to the recent growth of interest in the Protestant missionary movement and takes issue with the predominant interpretation of Irish Presbyterianism offered by David Miller who misunderstands the complex relationship between traditional Presbyterianism, evangelicalism and modernity. After an overview of the main developments between 1790 and 1840, a consideration of the influence of the Reformed theological tradition, eschatology and the growth of evangelicalism is followed by an examination of the Enlightenment, the expansion of the British empire and the Presbyterian sense of patriotic duty. Though various non-religious factors shaped Presbyterian attitudes to mission, it will be argued that their active involvement was a product of sincere religious conviction and an eschatological reading of the signs of the times.


2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Morrison

AbstractUsing a largely 'non-metropole' perspective, this article seeks to shed further light on New Zealand's Protestant missionary movement in the decades of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It argues that New Zealand missionaries and their supporters, in the period of 'high imperialism', held a range of both positive and negative positions towards the Empire. The article outlines the general contours of New Zealand Protestant missionary thinking about the British Empire, contours that reflected wider 'British' opinion of the period. However, it also argues that patterns of geographical and organisational affiliation both supported and confounded this thinking, which was complicated by the intersection of localised and globalising influences. The article considers certain missionary 'sites' of operation and influence as well as denominational and other factors. It situates its argument both in the context of debate over historiographical paradigms for settler societies like New Zealand, and in recent attempts to locate discussion of mission and imperialism within more discretely defined temporal and geographical parameters. En partant d'une perspective largement «non-métropolitaine,» cet article vise à éclairer d'une lumière nouvelle le mouvement missionnaire protestant néo-zélandais durant les dernières décennies du 19e siècle et le début du 20e siècle. Il montre que les missionnaires néo-zélandais et leurs soutiens adoptèrent, durant la période de l'«impérialisme triomphant,» une série d'attitudes à la fois positives et négatives en relation à l'Empire. L'article dessine les contours de la pensée du mouvement missionnaire néo-zélandais par rapport à l'Empire, et montre en quoi elle était le reflet de l'opinion «britannique» de l'époque. Cependant, l'implantation géographique et les affiliations organisationnelles des missionnaires, si elles étaient parfois en adéquation avec cette pensée, la contredisaient également, à l'interface entre influence locales et globales. L'article considère enfin certains «sites» missionnaires d'activité et d'influence ainsi que des facteurs confessionnels et autres. Il se situe à la fois au sein de débats historiographiques a propos des sociétés de colons comme la Nouvelle Zélande, et dans les tentatives récentes de recentrer la discussion à propos de la mission et de l'impérialisme dans une temporalité et un espace définis par des paramètres plus fins.


1905 ◽  
Vol 59 (1521supp) ◽  
pp. 24373-24374
Author(s):  
John Eliot
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Cao Yin

Red-turbaned Sikh policemen have long been viewed as symbols of the cosmopolitan feature of modern Shanghai. However, the origin of the Sikh police unit in the Shanghai Municipal Police has not been seriously investigated. This article argues that the circulation of police officers, policing knowledge, and information in the British colonial network and the circulation of the idea of taking Hong Kong as the reference point amongst Shanghailanders from the 1850s to the 1880s played important role in the establishment of the Sikh police force in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Furthermore, by highlighting the translocal connections and interactions amongst British colonies and settlements, this study tries to break the metropole-colony binary in imperial history studies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Clark

The 1890s were a key time for debates about imperial humanitarianism and human rights in India and South Africa. This article first argues that claims of humanitarianism can be understood as biopolitics when they involved the management and disciplining of populations. This article examines the historiography that analyses British efforts to contain the Bombay plague in 1897 and the Boer War concentration camps as forms of discipline extending control over colonized subjects. Secondly, human rights language could be used to oppose biopolitical management. While scholars have criticized liberal human rights language for its universalism, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberals did not believe that rights were universal; they had to be earned. It was radical activists who drew on notions of universal rights to oppose imperial intervention and criticize the camps in India and South Africa. These activists included two groups: the Personal Rights Association and the Humanitarian League; and the individuals Josephine Butler, Sol Plaatje, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, and Bal Gandadhar Tilak. However, these critics also debated amongst themselves how far human rights should extend.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


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