Manchester University Press - Missionaries and modernity

Many missionary societies established mission schools in the nineteenth century in the British Empire as a means to convert non-Europeans to Christianity. Although the details, differed in various colonial contexts, the driving ideology behind mission schools was that Christian morality was highest form of civilisation needed for non-Europeans to be useful members of colonies under British rule. This comprehensive survey of multi-colonial sites over the long time span clearly describes the missionary paradox that to draw in pupils they needed to provide secular education, but that secular education was seen to lead both to a moral crisis and to anti-British sentiments.

Reviews

'Missionaries and Modernity is an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning fields of mission studies, education, and humanitarianism, and should be a key assigned reading for numerous graduate courses as well as a discursive linchpin for any further discussion of imperialism, mission education, and competing definitions of "modernity" and subjecthood.'
Journal of Moravian History, Volume 23, Number 2, 2023, pp. 157-160

'This book is a must for any scholar wishing to study empire and the missionary dynamic that operated within it.'
International Journal for Indian Studies, Volume 8, Issue 2. December 2023, pp. 116-117

Introduction: entangled histories of missionary education
1 'Liberal and comprehensive' education: the Negro Education Grant and Nonconforming missionary societies in the 1830s
2 'The blessings of civilization': the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements)
3 Female education and the Liverpool Missionary Conference of 1860
4 Sustaining and secularising mission schools
5 Missionary lessons for Secular States: the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, 1910
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index