Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830–1910

Felicity Jensz’s deeply researched, well-written monograph, Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830–1910, is an ambitious, transnational analysis of the “civilizing” imperative of empire, education, and missionizing in both colonies and metropole. Jensz focuses throughout on the confluences yet conflicts between governmental and mission education agendas in diverse geopolitical and chronological colonial contexts. Throughout, she argues for the tension between, on the one hand, “colonial modernity” (a term coined by David Scott to broadly describe colonial governments’ attempts to “modernize” colonial subjects through, for example, voting, political participation and secular education) and, on the other hand, what Jensz dubs “missionary modernity.” Missionary modernity, Jensz posits, was a religious, rather than political, rationale that encompassed the liberal ideas of colonial modernity—“economic independence of individuals . . . universal education, and female emancipation from ‘traditional’ roles” (2–3), yet also transcended those secular goals by making central the goal instilling of “church order and moral discipline to shape non-Europeans into religious subjects” (3). Jensz posits that there was a “constant struggle to reconcile missionary and government ideals” (26), one that manifested in site-specific ways in various colonial and chronological contexts.To illustrate this ongoing struggle between colonial and missionary modernity, she fruitfully hinges her analysis on the intersections between mission directives, governmental institutional organizations, parliamentary activities, and discourses in pivotal axes that include: the Negro Educational Grant and subsequent 1838 parliamentary reports on post-emancipation education in the British West Indies (chap. 1); the Select Committee on Aborigines, founded in 1836–37 to provide oversight of the education and treatment of indigenous people in British settlements such as South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia (chap. 2); the 1860 Liverpool Missionary Conference and its focus on female education (chap. 3); the mid-to-late nineteenth-century secularization of mission schools through colonial governmental interventions in Sri Lanka and elsewhere (chap. 4); and the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1920 (chap. 5). The conflict between the goals of colonial and missionary education peaked at the Edinburgh conference with the findings of a commissioned report compiled by European and Euro-American missionary educators, Education in Relation to the Christianisation of National Life. The report revealed a crisis for missionary education that was galvanized by the increasingly secular education implemented by colonial governments.One of the great strengths of the book is that, while Jensz sustains throughout her overarching argument about the competing ideas of colonial and missionary modernity, she pays nuanced attention to how this plays out disparately in different sites and time periods. For example, chapter 2’s discussion of the Select Committee on Aborigines builds upon the previous chapter on the Negro Educational Grant to show that “modernising ‘progress’ was equated with the moral and religious ‘improvement’ of non-European populations in the British colonies.” Yet, the chapter simultaneously demonstrates that the Committee’s proposed religious instruction and education was “a much less liberal phrase” and intent than the goals of religious and moral education “debated in relation to the Negro Education Grant” (81). Jensz explains that this less liberal intent, despite the Aborigines Committee of 1836–1837 representing what many historians see as the zenith of humanitarian concern for Indigenous peoples throughout the empire, was born both of deepening racialist attitudes and a conviction that education in, for example, Australia and South Africa, was “compensation for British settler imperialism” (110).Indeed, Jensz takes great care in contextualizing and contrasting each of her analytical foci. Thus, she carefully interprets the Liverpool Missionary Conference into the particularities of emergent Christian views of women and their role in raising “the new generation of Christian subjects in colonial spaces” in the 1860s. Similarly, she probes the prewar zeitgeist of the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910, which prompted missionary groups to reconfigure their educational efforts to take “local conditions into consideration” (224). Jensz leads her reader securely through the changing dynamics of the sometimes colluding, sometimes conflicting dynamics of colonial government versus missionary society goals of “civilizing” and “modernizing” colonial subjects through education, adroitly demonstrating the shifting denouement of these goals from the 1830s to the 1910s.Although Jensz’s primary analytic lens is institutional—government committees, mission societies, and conferences—the writing is not dry. To the contrary, Jensz makes the book a lively read by populating it with individuals who are at once peculiar to a specific cultural moment and site, yet also emblematic of the larger twists and turns of competing colonial governmental and missionary educational and “civilizing” discourses and initiatives. To offer a few examples: In chapter 2’s discussion of the Negro Educational Grant we meet Charles Joseph Latrobe, commissioned by Parliament to produce reports on post-emancipation education in the British West Indies, and the Duke of Wellington, Sir Arthur Wellesley, who opposed nonconformist “liberal and comprehensive education (51). Chapter 4’s analysis of religious schools and colonial government in Sri Lanka includes a subsection, “Autobiographical notes from local teachers,” in which the reader learns the views of educators on the ground. A particularly striking example of how Jensz uses individual biographies to illuminate the larger issues comes in chapter 5, when we meet Behari Lal Singh, a Free Church of Scotland preacher in what was then Calcutta, who was an advocate of female education in Bengal in the mid-nineteenth century as “essential for the morality of a colonized society” (123); educated women were thus key to the development of missionary modernity. He was a vocal contributor to the debates about female education at the Liverpool Missionary Conference of 1860. Lal Singh’s work in female education and his personal biography typify how Jensz brings to life the ways in which individual human personalities and foibles interacted with the larger contours of colonial governmental and missionary attempts at education and “modernization.”This last point brings me to one critical quibble: throughout Missionaries and Modernity, Jensz uses “modernity,” “modernization,” and “modernizing” somewhat interchangeably and without precise conceptual clarity. These terms are also sometimes used interchangeably with “secularization.” For example, when discussing the Liverpool Missionary Conference Jensz concludes, “modernity brought with it secularisation and subsequently tension between missionary and government bodies, as well as local people” (151). The meaning of the term “modernity” is in and of itself contested by historians, as is “modernization.” Jensz herself concedes that there is “no master narrative” of the “continuum between the Enlightenment, modernisation and secularisation” (13). To be sure, as already noted, she defines quite precisely what she means by missionary (versus colonial) modernity. Nonetheless, it would have been helpful if she had pinned down more discretely the amorphous and sprawling meanings of “modernity,” “modernization,” and “modernizing” such that the liberal sprinkling of these terms through different geopolitical sites and time periods was rendered more conceptually discriminate and precise.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.