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Nature and the Godly Empire is a diffuse, eclectic, and at times awkward book. At one level it makes a contribution to the continuing debate about the shifting relationships of science and religion. It also reflects historians' current preoccupations with the growth and acquisition of knowledge about the non-western world and the conceptual uneasiness of that field. Simultaneously it focuses on the well-known history of the London Missionary Society in the south Pacific. Embracing all these concerns, the author claims as his central concern the ‘place of science in missionary practice’ (p. 7), but then at once qualifies his position, pointing out that today's categories of science, religion and colonialism remained ill-defined if not indistinguishable from each other in this period. This is said to explain why a variety of other categories are therefore pressed into service—such as nature, natural history, natural theology, natural history practices, and theologies of nature. Finally, rejecting ‘historical explanations of missions’ that ‘privilege theology or politics’ (p. 136)—including apparently most of the earlier historiography—Sivasundaram tackles the grand question of missionary contributions to the shaping of both colonial empire and the character of metropolitan society. Missionary writings and indigenous responses, he insists, point to ‘an independent genre of control’, separate and distinct from ‘political annexation’, namely ‘providential colonialism’. Missionary actions and islanders’ selections led to the transformation of landscape and society, witnessed not only in local forms of ‘agrarian providentialism’, but in chapel building, settlement, even the LMS museum in London, and islanders’ clothing. At times it is difficult to follow Sivasundaram's arguments, flying off as they do in all directions. Chapter 2, for example, in discussing ‘nature and mission education’ seems to have only the barest connection with either nature or science. The process of conversion (ch. 3) may, as he says, have its analogies with natural processes such as planting and maturation; but why the same ‘could [my italics] be said of “the process of sanctification” ’ (p. 97) is never explained. Deaths (ch. 4) might prompt comparisons and parallels, for example, between Captain James Cook and the missionary John Williams. But the visual depictions of landscape in representations of Williams's murder at Eromanga is surely more ambiguous, even far less relevant, than is allowed for here. Other chapters bring home their message to greater effect. Missionary settlements, planting, building, attempts at commercial development and exchange, all contributed in a greater or (more usually) lesser degree to a changing environment. In glossing previous scholarly comment on ‘the three Cs’—civilisation, commerce and Christianity—Sivasundaram emphasises their association with notions of progress and modernity. The advance or absence of all three provided indicators of the challenges faced by missionaries, and offered helpful yardsticks of missionary achievement in reaching evangelical goals. Such demonstrations were valuable both in sustaining the commitment and confidence of missionary subscribers at home, and in emphasising for islanders the potential value of accommodating a degree of ‘civilisation’. Missionary perceptions of changes in the natural and social environments had an important place for all parties to the exchange in making comprehensible and real the unseen processes of spiritual and religious transformation. In observing and recording these changes, Sivasundaram argues, missionaries were genuinely men of science, creating a ‘missionary natural history’ and providing an evangelical response (overwhelmingly from ‘below’) to the secular science of educated elites. Historians should not read too much into Williams's contacts with Charles Darwin, and they may wonder at the degree of ‘orchestration’ attributed to correspondence between Thomas Haweis and Joseph Banks. Still, there is no doubt that missionary curiosity, general knowledge, and transmission of information about the natural world continued to attract both popular and elite audiences throughout the century. Stressing as he does the role of the islanders quite as much as that of the missionaries in dictating the course of adaptation and change, Sivasundaram seeks nevertheless to convince his readers that where there was ‘science’ there also was external control and colonial empire. Why historians should feel free to ‘privilege’ nature and science above politics and theology in isolating the principal missionary contribution to the dynamics of empire building remains unexplained.
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