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Spirits of extraction

Christianity, settler colonialism and the geology of race

By Claire Blencowe

Spirits of extraction
Hardcover -
  • Price: £85.00
  • ISBN: 9781526176509
  • Publish Date: Mar 2025
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
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    Book Information

    Description

    Spirits of extraction revisits the troubling history of socially reformist, ostensibly anti-racist, Christianity and its role in the expansion of the extractive industries, British imperialism, and settler colonialism. The book explores key moments in the history of Methodism and the evangelical movement. Colonial fears, and the attempt to 'civilise savages', were crucial to the movement's foundation in eighteenth-century industrialising Bristol, England. Through the culture of the Cornish mining diaspora of the nineteenth century, Methodism enmeshed with all the complexity of race and labour-structures of the British empire. At the same time, in Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canda/Ontario, Methodist missionaries laid the foundation of abusive education and racialised ideas of redemption that both enable and sacralise the mining industry. Through these histories of our present, the book theorises the relation of religion and education to racism, modernity, biopower, extractivism, and the geology of race.

    Contents

    Introduction: John Wesley's ghost and the metaphysics of race
    1 Savage encounters and the scene of evangelical awakening in Bristol, England
    2 Mining, methodism and the geology of race in the Cornish diaspora
    3 Methodist missions, Ojibwe Copper, and civilisational education in Upper Canada (Ontario)/ Anishinaabewaki
    Afterword: Bristol in the colonial present, 2024
    Bibliography
    Index

    Author

    Claire Blencowe is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick

    Spirits of extraction

    By Claire Blencowe

    Hardcover £85.00 / $130.00

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