Our member, Dr Felicity Jensz (University of Münster, Germany), talks about her book, Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830-1910 (Manchester University Press, 2022).
This book follows the ideologies behind providing missionary schooling in British colonies to non-Europeans in the long-nineteenth century, and what happened when these were not met. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, missionary societies often provided schooling to non-Europeans without much government interference into the content or structures of schools. However, by the end of the century this had changed dramatically with much more (colonial) government control and oversight and, in places, the need for missionaries to respond to the wants of local peoples, or lose their pupils. Despite the efforts of missionaries, by the end of the century Christian schools were often deemed a foreign influence rather than institutions that were deeply embedded in local lives, societies and politics, and were considered non-adaptive for local situations. Rather than give up, missionary groups reinvented themselves as experts on education and continued to maintain the belief that they were best situated to provide Western forms of education to local peoples.
This book was inspired by a desire to undercover the paradox of secularised missionary education, particularly in light of the conversations I was having with my colleagues in the interdisciplinary research group “Religion and Politics” about secularisation, multiple modernities and the entangled nature of religion and politics. As a colonial historian I was aware that within the field of new imperial history, missionary history and attempts to educate non-Europeans had not received sustained attention. People are aware that missionaries provided some of the earliest forms of colonial education, but the processes behind the transformation from prominently Bible-based missionary schooling to standardised governmental education has not been rigorously examined. My book is a contribution to understanding the process and what it meant for subject making within the British Empire.
In the nineteenth century, education was generally seen as ‘a characteristic feature of modern civilization’. The provision of universal liberal education was considered to reduce crime, to improve the condition of the poor, to improve the ‘moral character of man’ and to unite people ‘in one whole, or integral part of the nation [such that] they will be enabled, by the immense strength arising from their union, to obtain redress of their grievances by prudent, sober, and legal means’. The welfare of the nation as well as the welfare of the individual were perceived to jointly benefit from universal liberal education. Colonial governments also had an interest in the creation of moral subjects, religious people were considered to be necessary for the social order and security of a society.
Religious education was thus considered indispensable for the creation of Christian subjects; however, questions were increasingly raised in government circles as to what else should be included in curricula. It has been argued that the most important legacy of Christian missions was the introduction of secular education, which is seen by many to have modernised the non-Western world. Yet, as this book argues, there was a belief amongst missionary groups that for non-Europeans to embrace ‘modernity’ efficiently, they needed a particular form of modernity – ‘missionary modernity’ – that included the Christian education of locals in schools.
In the nineteenth century, the distinction between religious and secular education was not always clear, particularly as missionary groups were the predominant providers of schooling. The British Imperial government supported religious schools in its colonies (with India being somewhat of an exception), and debates surrounding schooling generally did not focus on whether religion ought to be taught but rather on who ought to supply schooling in general. This differed to the situation in the French colonies where a strict(er) separation between religion and politics was in place, often making the work of missionaries difficult.
However, as British Imperial and colonial governments took much more active roles over the century in schooling their subjects, missionaries were forced to reconsider how the religious content of schooling could still be delivered and how they could maintain their moral authority in light of governmental conditions applied to educational work in return for providing funding and implementing external examination. Missionary methods were heterogeneous; however, as attested to by discussions at various missionary conferences, there were similarities in the ways in which schooling and education were thought best to be brought to non-European groups over three distinct stages of mission, even though in situ reactions differed widely.
These stages of mission ‘progress’ are conceived of here as introductory, permanent and reproductive stages of mission. In the introductory stage, mission groups commonly taught in English and tried to gain adherents for the mission. In the second stage, the permanent stage, a shift of teaching to the vernacular often occurred with an increase in local teachers. In the third stage, the reproductive stage, local people took Missionaries and modernity over more responsibilities as missions progressed towards becoming local churches.
The stages did not occur in all places neatly. Missionaries also reacted to local conditions, and adapted through changes in target pupils or subject matter. Such adaptations were by no means one-way processes: Indigenous peoples also shifted their allegiances away from missionaries when schooling did not accord with their desires – for example, through changing denominations or confessions, often creating rivalries between religious groups, or even establishing their own schools with their own ‘Native’ teachers.
Mission schools were also ideological ‘spaces’ which, through their form and function, articulated notions of the ‘rightful’ place of non-Europeans in colonial societies, whether on mission stations, in broader colonial settings or as members of transnational churches, with ‘ideology’ itself referring to a set of normative beliefs held by a group that informs the group’s actions. In agreeing to work within government systems, missionary groups opened themselves to a double secularisation in terms both of school curricula and of structural authority. Important here is the consideration of secularisation as a form of functional differentiation between church and state duties rather than as a weakening of private religious beliefs.
Not all missionary groups, or individual missionaries, agreed with government involvement in schooling, yet in many ways it was an inevitable consequence of the ‘civilisation’ of non-European countries through colonisation as governments increasingly tried to control the lives of their subjects. Missionaries advocated the modernisation of the societies in which they worked, as did British educational reformists, with both groups equating education with modern civilisation and the increased welfare of individuals and society at large.
Yet, many missionary societies did not equate modernisation with secularisation; rather, missionary modernity rested on Christian morals being the foundation of mission schooling, which aimed to shape a pupil into a modern colonial subject. The secularisation of missionary schooling was complex and although it did not necessarily prevent religion being taught in schools, it shifted the authority of schooling into the hands of governments rather than religious groups. Through government intervention in mission schools, religious bodies lost their privileged positions as the dominant providers of education to non-Europeans, and thereby also lost some of their moral relevance.
The scope of schooling was broadened from the creation of religiously minded people bounded by moral governance to include the creation of colonial subjects to be assimilated, integrated and included or excluded from colonial structures. Secular subjects were considered to be important for the ‘raising’ of the so-called ‘heathen’ into the folds of ‘civilisation’, and were perceived to contribute to the transition from communities that were steeped in superstitions to groups of modern, civilised Christian individuals who were rational and enlightened. Christian education was seen by many to facilitate the modernisation of ‘traditional’, non-Western societies, and to produce people aware of their individual souls that could transcend the imminent. This process was seen to be in opposition to traditional beliefs, and to allow converts to Christianity to detach themselves from traditional community structures and beliefs.
As Martin Fuchs, Antje Linkenbach and Wolfgang Reinhard have argued, missionaries did not limit themselves to fostering the individualisation of non-Europeans; rather, they saw themselves as ‘ambassadors of a materially and intellectually superior Western culture and thus set out along with colonial administrators to propagate the modernization of all areas of life’. In other words, the modernisation of non-Europeans was expected to be a total endeavour. Yet, as I argue, the different logic of colonial and missionary modernity used the same tools, such as schooling, for different ends.