Introduction
This essay will focus on the issue of identity. In particular it will examine the impact of missionary works on the issues of race and class in nineteenth century Britain. Missions played an important role in the creation of race and class identities, a role that recent historiography is beginning to engage with. They acted as an important interface between the domestic and the colonial worlds, and as such contributed to the image of the “Other”. Here missionaries played a pivotal role both in terms of the acquisition of knowledge about peoples overseas, and also in the transmission of this knowledge within British domestic society. In the nineteenth century missions were one of the few outlets of information about the peoples they encountered abroad, and conveyed this information in a variety of formats, including very popular newsletters , educative and entertaining meetings , and even exhibitions . This reflected the importance of mission and hence colonialism to the evangelical imagination , and played a vital role in popularising the empire . There were, of course, many other sources of discourse relating to the colonial experience ; these included newspapers (often explicitly educative with regard to the colonies) , commercial advertising, entertainment such as that of the music hall, and impressions gained though personal and family connections . However the impact of religious discourses was particularly significant given the position of the church, and in particular evangelicalism, within Victorian society. The level of church attendance, although of some concern, was much higher than it is today, and subsequent absentees would have retained images promulgated and internalised at Sunday School . Religious institutions played a key role in educating public opinion , and Evangelicalism’s penetration of British culture was decisive in reorienting British political thought . Moreover the issue of missions would be used to mediate power disputes between different sections of British society, this issue being discussed in more detail below.
The essay will take the following structure. Section One will consider the construction of the racial “Other”. Here we will discuss the selective nature of this process, and then look in detail at how images of non-whites changed over the course of the nineteenth century, with a view to establishing the dynamic and contested nature of these conceptions. Section Two will look at how discourses of alterity impacted on how British people thought about themselves. Creating an image of “the Other” created a corresponding image of oneself. It also created a variety of labels that were applied to the poor within Britain’s own domestic society, this internal application taking place in particular historical circumstances and for particular reasons to be explored below. Section Three will consider the implications of identity for our understanding of “modernity”, and also for what it means to engage with the history of European societies, Britain in particular.
Defining the “Other”
Missionaries’ representations of the peoples they encountered overseas were influential, but were far from neutral. In terms of scope, they related to the overseas society as a whole; missionaries were interested in the conversion of every member of that society, and so depicted the general situation that they had to deal with. The missionaries’ message was highly selective, and this selectivity occurred on a number of levels. It took place unintentionally, in that missionaries noticed things that resonated with their own perspectives, and interpreted in the light of their own categories. This information was collected in the context of a power imbalance, missionary power dominating that of their potential converts. But the selectivity was also intentional, the intention being to promote the missionary agenda of conversion, to propagandise the need for missions, and to encourage more funding and volunteers . This resulted in the editing and repackaging of information regarding the “Other”. Foucault’s scepticism as regards the neutrality of knowledge is relevant here; his concept of power-knowledge helpfully illuminates the insight that missionaries’ knowledge of the “Other” was inseparable from their own power, and their own agenda.
Missionary representations of the “Other” were both internally complex and were contested by other discourses over the course of the nineteenth century. Early in the century both missionary representation of the “Other”, and membership of missionary organisations , overlapped with those of the abolitionists . Their discourses centred around the idea of the brotherhood of man, and as such was universalist . However this is not to say that the slaves were viewed as equals; they were considered inferior , albeit with the potential to progress, in the context of the proper relationship between peoples . A further ambivalence was that black people were viewed both as savages needing salvation from moral degradation , but yet also as somehow pure and pristine needing protection, and perhaps as having something white societies had themselves lost. This positive component was used to criticise rapacious white planters and traders , and domestic society more generally. So the “Other” was equal but not equal, both repudiated and desired, in a complex of representations that was deeply contradictory . It was also contested; a central competing discourse being that of the plantation owners promoted their own caricature of “Quashee” , with a view to maintaining the status quo. By the 1850s and 60s, however, the predominant discourses were changing . Racial thinking had hardened, and increasing emphasis was placed on the biological and hence essential differences between races . This assumed not just hierarchy but the permanence of inequality, ruling out the possibility of reform . The universalist outlook had been undermined , and the structure of feeling had changed . This shift both distanced missionaries from empire and was contested by them . However now even supporters of “the negro” were less whole-hearted and had a markedly less optimistic assessment of their “potential” . A combination of factors had contributed to this change. First, the missionary vision of the post-Emancipation West Indies had been disappointed ; the former slaves often turned their backs on Christian principles, producing disillusionment on the part of the missionaries . Second, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica in 1865 changed attitudes . These rebellions clashed with earlier abolitionist representations of non-Europeans as being passive and grateful recipients of charity , and led to questioning of the basic rationality of non-Europeans . Third, a range of voices emerged that were critical of non-Europeans, especially in the light of social problems closer to home . Most notably these included Carlyle and his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” and also Dickens’ essay on “The Noble Savage”. They marked a discursive break with universalism . Fourth, scientific developments in phrenology, evolution and anthropology led to an increasing emphasis on biological differences . They also led to a new emphasis on science itself, and the ideas of classification, rationality, and expertise . So in the ways sketched above, the “Other” was made and remade in a construction of identity that was ongoing and historically particular , and complex rather than coherent .
Defining the “Self”
Definition of the “Other” is intimately linked to the definition of the “Self”. We can define ourselves on the basis of what we are not, and construct our own identities in opposition to those of the “Other” . In this sense, identity is intrinsically relational . The consciousness of colonisers exists only through dynamic interaction with the colonised . The construction of the “Other” was complex, and different aspects played different roles within the construction of the “Self”. The element of British discourse that defined the “Other” as savage created an enjoyable sense of superiority , with the British occupying the top position in a racial hierarchy. It both explained and justified empire , merging the idea of racial superiority with the religious conception of a chosen people , with the empire being a providential responsibility . The idea that the savages needed conversion combined the ideas of racial, theological and moral superiority . The idea of modernity is also relevant here; missionaries were self-consciously modern , and this aspect of their identity was defined in opposition to the backwardness of “the savage”. The existence of “savages” also helped to define the boundaries of England’s “imagined community”, thereby creating a sense of unity . In the first half of the nineteenth century being a “friend of the Negro” was a mobilising political identity , demonstrating the “true spirit of Birmingham” . The non-Europeans’ subsequent lack of willingness to cooperate caused problems for British attempts to define themselves on this basis, and so in the 1850s the imperial imaginary began to shift , with non-Europeans recast as a threat . The corresponding shift in British self-definition took the form of a new emphasises on the unique qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race , and on the exclusive ideal of the “manly citizen” , more interested in improving their own towns’ positions and in European nationalisms than in the “civilising mission”.
The internal “Other”
Representations of the “Other” were also applied to the “Self” – to domestic society. Specifically, the poor and in particular criminals came to be defined in terms that drew on racial categories , being labelled as “barbarous”, “unenlightened” or “uncivilised” . Missions played an important role in this development, one that in some ways paralleled their role as interface between metropole and colony. They were an important source of information about the poor, often the only bourgeois presence in an economically segregated society , and drew attention to the presence of heathens in Britain itself as well as overseas (the extent of which was highlighted by a religious census in 1851) . Their uses of racial conceptions to describe the poor makes sense given the overlap between domestic and foreign missions, in terms of membership, financing, influencing each-other’s techniques , and their having the same basic project of reforming the world . The poor at home and the blacks abroad were linked by the concept of sin . They were both heathens. The discourses of race and poverty did not mirror each other , but they interacted , and early Victorians assumed their underlying similarity . Moreover, competition for resources between domestic and foreign missions encouraged each group to emphasise and exaggerate the depravity of their potential beneficiaries .
Britain’s emerging middle classes used representations of the “Other” as a means of asserting their position in the emerging “public sphere” that was part of the new industrial society in Britain . They distinguished themselves from the poor by using the new racial vocabulary of class to both underline their difference and to articulate their fears . The “Other” also allowed the middle classes to assert their own position against the establishment; the industrialist middle classes were looked down on by the political elites, but were able to use their philanthropic support of missions to assert their own importance and identity . Crucially this was done in a way that was politically “safe”; by framing their concern for the poor in terms of sin rather than material well-being, and by focussing a great deal of effort overseas rather than at home, the middle classes avoided the suggestion that they might forge an alliance with the lower classes, which would have sounded alarm bells in the establishment not least given the revolutionary background in Europe . Unsurprisingly, focus on the spiritual well being of people overseas found little favour with domestic political radicals .
Identity, modernity, and the nature of “British” history
The constructions of identity discussed above have a number of implications for what we understand by “modernity”. Modernity was constructed in opposition to the predominant construction of the “Other” – “the savage”. “The savage” personified tradition, and in its difference to “the savage”, modernity was born . Hobsbawm and Ranger’s insight that tradition is “invented” is highly relevant here . Further, the concept of the “civilising mission” assumes a distinction between the “civilised world” and the “uncivilised world”, between the “modern” and “traditional” societies. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating and promoting these discourses, and doing so they helped to construct new identities for the “Other” and for the “Self”. As we have seen, the discourses to which missionaries contributed were contested, ongoing, and historically particular. The “Other” and the “Self” were each made and remade, in processes that were dynamic and multiple . It was in these discourses that modernity was created, both in the substantive sense of the “Self” as being constructed in opposition to the traditional “Other”, and also in the sense that new identities were being born. Our discussion of identity therefore suggests that modernity is most usefully understood as being discursive, and that missionary agency played a significant part in its creation .
The way in which identities were constructed also tells us something about the nature of British history. British constructions of the “Other”, and making of its own identities in the light of the “Other”, were crucially dependent on ideas generated in engagement with - and imported from - Britain’s colonial relationships. Frantz Fanon’s idea of mutual constitution between coloniser and colonised is relevant here, particularly his insight that “without colonialism there would have been no Europe” . British history cannot be understood as somehow abstracted from that of the empire; their histories are interdependent . This point should not be understood in the narrow sense of meaning that Britain’s “foreign policy” relations with empire ought to be taken into account. Rather, as we have seen Britain’s imperial relationships were highly relevant to British identities and to its entire domestic and cultural history, especially given the cultural penetration and political importance of both evangelicalism and the colonial imaginary. We have also seen the important role that missions played in their privileged position as interface between metropole and colonies, and hence as agents for Britain’s domestic transformation . Conversely, the histories of Britain’s former colonies cannot be adequately considered without engaging fully with their relationships with Britain, and with each other. These relationships were complex and dialectic, even if the power relations were far from equal . Finally, the idea of British history can itself be disaggregated by looking at the impact of colonialism on provincial identities, as carried out with regard to Birmingham by Catherine Hall in “Civilising Subjects” . In short: British identities and so British modernity were significantly constituted in relation to Britain’s possessions overseas, and so British history must adopt an analytic framework that is, similarly, transnational .
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