Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Faught, C. Brad. Review of The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914, edited by Andrew Porter. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003. Anglican and Episcopal History 74, no. 1 (2005): 131-133. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL: 416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Faught, C. Brad. Review of The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880- 1914, edited by Andrew Porter. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003. Anglican and Episcopal History 74, no. 1 (2005): 131-133. 131 BOOK REVIEWS Andrew Porter, Ed. The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2003. Pp. xiii 4- 250, introduction, bibliography, index. $45.00 (paper). Brian Stanley, Ed. Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2003. Pp. x + 313, introduction, bibliography, index. $45.00 (paper). Variously told histories of British Imperialism have re-emerged in recent years, most notably The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998- 99), edited by William Roger Louis, and Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2002), by Niall Ferguson. These books, as well as others, are evidence that empire (sometimes more narrowly defined as post-colonial studies) is very much in vogue, driven in part by the “imperial” preoccupations of the United States, as well as by the ever-present questions of first world-third world 132 ANGLICAN AND EPISCOPAL HISTORY relations. In any treatment of British Imperialism at least, the “missionary factor,” to use Roland Oliver’s famous phrase of half-a-century ago, is one that necessarily continues to demand investigation. And to this end a number of scholars have been probing the complex history of British (Protestant) missionary activity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth- century empire. Of especial importance to this scholarly effort are the various titles published by Eerdmans in the series “Studies in the History of Christian Missions.” Two of these titles concern us here. The first, The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914, edited by Andrew Porter, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at Kings College London, probes the multi-faceted face of the late-Victorian and Edwardian missionary movement The volume is comprised of nine essays, all of which are drawn from the work of the North Atlantic Missiology Project, an enterprise established by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia and based within the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. The essays range broadly, both thematically and geographically, and do much to enlighten the role and place of Christianity and the church during what was a thirty-four year period of intense imperial expansion and propaganda, especially by Great Britain, from 1880 until the outbreak of the First World War. A commonplace approach to Imperial history has been to either essentially ignore religion or to treat it in an unexamined way as simply “chaplain to empire.” These essays, beginning with David Bebbington’s on the mostly neglected theological dimension of Imperial expansion, offer a nuanced corrective to this faulty approach. For scholars of the Church of England, and to Anglican readers more generally, the volume contains a number of essays of particular value, especially Steven Maughan’s on Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, bishop of Tasmania. Montgomery was convinced of the essential rightness of the late-Victorian British Imperial project. Espousing what he called an “Imperial Christianity,” Montgomery led the high-church Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in the 1890s, and used his position as the so-called “Archbishop of the World of Missions” to campaign for an expansive view of Anglican missionary responsibilities that could and should transcend Church of England intra-party lines. While Montgomery was unsuccessful in effecting this grand vision, his attempt links nicely to some of the other leading themes of the high Imperial era such as race, science, women, and Indian and African 133 BOOK REVIEWS nationalism, all of which are considered in detail in the essays contained within Imperial Horizons. The volume, well-written and superbly edited by a leading historian of the British Empire, does much to place missions in the mainstream of Imperial historiography, a reflection of its proper position as a key feature of Britain’s and Europe’s fin de siecle worldwide expansion. The second volume in the Eerdmans series considered here, Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire, probes the continuing Imperial story, half-a-century on. Edited by Brian Stanley, a Cambridge- based scholar of missions, the volume brings together thirteen essays, which are divided into three parts. The creation and development of colonial nationalism, especially from the 1920s to the 1950s, is the focus of most of the essays, particularly those in parts two and three. In this way, the variegated impact that Christian identities had on Indian nationalism under the Raj, for example, or that the translation of the Bible into KiSwahili had on the emergence of the nationalist Mau Mau movement in Kenya, is examined. Highly instructive too, is the treatment of missions and Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, which the essay’s author, Richard Elphick, depicts as formative for the later establishment of apartheid. Accordingly, the most important feature of the volume as a whole is its elucidation of the central place held by the construction of religious identity in the development of nationalism and the march to independence that both accompanied and followed it. The volume clarifies the necessity of taking into account the complexities of the impact of Christianity in the emergence of anti-Imperial movements, especially those in mid-twentieth-century Africa. Revealingly, as Stanley points out, “there has been in Africa no lasting contradictions between Christian and national allegiance.” Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire goes a great distance in elaborating a Christianity of colonial nationalism and independence. As a number of the essays make plain, particularly those by John Stuart and Philip Boobbyer, mission Christianity was a complex and often contradictory phenomenon, which had the dual effect of both championing empire and subverting it. For anyone interested in how and why the British Empire came to an end, and the part played in that protracted and controversial process by mission Christianity, this book can fairly be called indispensable. C. Brad Faught Tyndale University College Toronto, Ontario, Canada ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****