Beyond sovereignty?: Protestant missions, empire and transnationalism, 1890–1950

Abstract

There have so far been few overt signs of intersection or overlap between the long-standing field of mission studies and the relatively new field of transnational studies. Missiology, the study of the theory and practice of Christian mission, is strongly informed by theology and has developed as a discipline at some remove from broader studies of mission history and of the relationship between missions, state and empire.1 For historians seeking to move beyond the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘national’ histories, missions are likely to be problematic entities because of the perceived closeness of their links with the nation-state and with empire. As a result, they may be overlooked.2 That missionaries possessed nationalistic and imperialistic longings there can be no doubt; recent mission scholarship, especially of the ‘high imperial’ period from 1880 to 1914, makes this plain.3 But such longings were in the main untypical. In the longer term, as the historian of British Protestant missions and empire Andrew Porter has recently argued, Christian mission’s theological emphasis made it not only a solvent of imperial authority but also a stimulus to ‘anti-imperialism’, religious and secular.

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