Protestant ethics and the spirit of imperialism: British Congregationalists and the London Missionary Society, 1795-1925.

This dissertation is broadly concerned with the British public's attitudes towards the Empire and its peoples during the 19th and early 20th century. It focuses on a particular institutional site of the formation of imperialist and racialist ideologies: the mobilization of home support for foreign missions. Foreign missionary societies enjoyed access to a socially diverse and politically active sector of the British public through their institutional ties to organized religion. These institutions generated and preserved rich sources, on the basis of which this study has tried to probe beyond conventional literary representations of imperial ideas to a more social historical analysis of imperialist ideology. Which is to say, the aim throughout the dissertation has been to locate the extensive propaganda produced by missionary societies, their imperial idea, in the social and political circumstances of its metropolitan reception and deployment. In order to link imperial text with metropolitan context as concretely as possible, I have focused on a single missionary organization, the London Missionary Society, and its local auxiliaries. Although officially non-denominational, the L.M.S. looked primarily to Britain's Congregational churches for financial support. In addition to their patronage of the L.M.S., British Congregationalists were ardent promoters of home missions as well, which insured the L.M.S. at least as significant a channel into the working class community as any other organization with imperial wares to sell in British political culture. And finally, Congregationalists were prominent within the powerful Nonconformist faction of the Liberal Party. These are the primary narratives whose intersections constitute the focus of this study: missionaries' imperialism, the social structure of organized religion, and the broader political discourse of Liberal Nonconformity.Ph.D.European historyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligious historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128603/2/9034529.pd