The Role of Missionaries in the British Empire

The British missionary movement was, in its late-Victorian heyday, one of the most thoroughly organised private enterprises in the world. At the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference — sometimes called the World Missionary Conference — the Church Missionary Society alone could report 1,140 European missionaries in the field, supported by an annual income of nearly £400,000. The London Missionary Society, the Baptist Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Methodists, the Free Church of Scotland, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the English Catholic orders together fielded perhaps another two thousand. By 1914 there were more British Protestant missionaries overseas than there were British district officers in the Colonial Service.

The relationship between this vast network and the apparatus of the empire was always going to be contested. The missions were, on the one hand, doctrinally committed to the proclamation of the Gospel and to the conversion of the heathen, and they jealously guarded their independence from the colonial state. However, the missions depended on the state for protection, the enforcement of marriage laws, the allocation of land, and the regulation of indigenous religious practices. The history of the British missionary movement is, in effect, the history of that ambivalence.

Origins: The Evangelical Revival

The British missionary movement was a creature of the late-eighteenth-century Evangelical revival. The Clapham Sect — Wilberforce, Thornton, Granville Sharp, Zachary Macaulay, and the Venns — had shown that Evangelical piety could be turned into a political programme: the campaign against the slave trade, the establishment of the Sierra Leone settlement (1787), and ultimately the Abolition of Slavery Act 1833 were all, in part, products of the same nexus. The first missionary society, the Baptist Missionary Society, was founded at Kettering on 2 October 1792, with William Carey as its first emissary; the LMS followed in 1795, the CMS in 1799, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1818. By 1830, every denomination with an evangelical wing had a missionary board.

The theology was Calvinist, the geography was coastal, and the resources were modest. The early CMS missionaries — Henry Martyn, Claudius Buchanan, the Corrie brothers — were gentlemen with university educations and small inheritances. The LMS relied on a wider pool of tradesmen and artisans (William Carey had been a shoemaker) and, increasingly, on indigenous catechists who did much of the actual work of evangelisation.

Africa: The Principal Theatre

Africa was where the British missionary effort concentrated after 1840. The CMS had opened its first sub-Saharan mission in Sierra Leone in 1804, and from the 1840s onward it expanded into Yorubaland (Nigeria), the Gold Coast, the Niger Delta, Uganda (1877), Kenya, and Tanganyika. The LMS worked among the Khoisan and Xhosa of the Cape Colony and then northward into Bechuanaland, Nyasaland, and Tanganyika. The Scottish missions — the Free Church of Scotland at Livingstonia and Blantyre, the Established Church at Lovedale — became the model for the secondary-school network of British Central Africa.

David Livingstone, who had been sent to Kuruman in 1841 as an LMS missionary, became the movement’s most famous representative after his 1852–56 trans-African journey and his death at Chitambo’s village on 1 May 1873. The 1884–85 Berlin Conference, in making “effective occupation” a condition of international recognition of colonial claims, gave missionaries a new and sometimes involuntary role as flag-bearers of the imperial powers — most notoriously in the Congo Free State of Leopold II, where British missionaries were among the first to denounce, and the last to leave, a regime of concession-company brutality.

India: A Restrained and Ambiguous Enterprise

In British India, the missionary project was constrained from the start by the East India Company’s policy of religious neutrality. The Charter Act of 1813, pushed through by Wilberforce and Macaulay’s father Zachary, opened India to missionaries; the Charter Act of 1833 removed the remaining legal disabilities. From the 1830s onward, Baptist, Methodist, CMS, and Scottish missionaries established stations across Bengal, Madras, the Punjab, and the North-Western Provinces. They ran some of the best schools in the subcontinent — CMS College Kottayam (1817), Scottish Church College Calcutta (1830), St Stephen’s College Delhi (1881) — and they produced a literature in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Urdu, and Marathi that, in many cases, is still in print.

The limits, however, were severe. Christian numbers in India grew only slowly — from about 1.4 million in 1871 to roughly 6.6 million in 1941, a much smaller proportion than in Africa. The 1857 Rebellion, fairly or unfairly, was widely attributed to missionary provocation, and the British Indian government imposed further restrictions on missionary access. As Andrew Porter has shown in Missions and Empire (2004), the missions’ actual influence on the British Indian state was much less than the rhetoric of either side suggested.

The Pacific and New Zealand

The Pacific was the LMS’s earliest field. The Duff, dispatched from London in 1796, established the mission in Tahiti in 1797; the LMS then moved on to Samoa, Tonga, the New Hebrides, the Loyalty Islands, and the Cook Islands. The CMS was the dominant society in New Zealand after 1814, where the Rev. Henry Williams, his brother William, and the lay catechist Thomas Kendall played a significant — and contested — role in the negotiations that produced the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society built a powerful network in Fiji from 1835 and in Tonga from 1826, and by 1900 the Wesleyan churches accounted for the largest Christian populations in Polynesia.

The Politicisation of the Missionary Movement

The late Victorian missionary movement was, increasingly, a political movement. Missionaries pressed colonial governments to suppress practices they considered immoral — sati, thuggee, polygamy, the ritual murder accusations in Central Africa — and they produced detailed exposés of colonial abuses. The CMS missionary John Philip, in his Researches in South Africa (1828), was the first European to give a systematic account of the dispossession of the Khoisan under the Cape Colony’s racial hierarchies. Mary Slessor, the Scottish missionary in Calabar, denounced the abuses of the Royal Niger Company until her death in 1915. The CMS missionaries Henry Streane and Arthur West Jessel were among the loudest voices against forced labour in East Africa in the 1920s.

The most consequential political intervention of the British missionary movement was, however, its role in the campaign against the slave trade. The 1841 Niger expedition was the brainchild of Thomas Fowell Buxton, a successor of Wilberforce, and was staffed largely by missionaries. Buxton’s The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (1840) was the founding text of a campaign that ran, in various forms, until the Brussels Act of 1890 and the establishment of the East Africa Protectorate in 1895.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British missionary movement has been transformed in the last forty years. The older celebratory literature — the centenary histories of the CMS and the LMS — has been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical scholarship represented by Andrew Porter’s Missions and Empire (2004), Brian Stanley’s The Bible and the Flag (1990), and Brian Harrison’s Seek the Good Land (1992). Susan Thorne’s Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (1999) is the most influential study of the metropolitan roots of the movement. The unresolved question in the field is how to weigh the genuine humanitarianism of figures like Wilberforce, Slessor, and Philip against the destructive consequences of the missionary encounter with non-Christian societies — a question that the scholars above have answered differently, and that the present generation of historians is, predictably, still arguing about.

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