Jane Samson - Race and Redemption: British Missionaries Encounter Pacific Peoples, 1797-1920

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS

R. E. Frykenberg

Brian Stanley

General Editors

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS

Alvyn Austin

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Chad M. Bauman

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Michael Bergunder

The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the Twentieth Century

Judith M. Brown and Robert Eric Frykenberg, Editors

Christians, Cultural Interactions, and Indias Religious Traditions

John B. Carman and Chilkuri Vasantha Rao

Christians in South Indian Villages, 1959-2009: Decline and Revival in Telangana

Robert Eric Frykenberg

Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication Since 1500

Susan Billington Harper

In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V. S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India

D. Dennis Hudson

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Patrick Harries and David Maxwell, Editors

The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa

Ogbu U. Kalu, Editor, and Alaine M. Low, Associate Editor

Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities

Donald M. Lewis, Editor

Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century

Jessie G. Lutz

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Stephen S. Maughan

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Jon Miller

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Andrew Porter, Editor

The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914

Dana L. Robert, Editor

Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1709-1914

Jane Samson

Race and Redemption: British Missionaries Encounter Pacific Peoples, 1797-1920

Wilbert R. Shenk, Editor

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Brian Stanley

The World Missionary Conference: Edinburgh 1910

Brian Stanley, Editor

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Brian Stanley, Editor

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John Stuart

British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East, Central, and Southern Africa, 1939-64

T. Jack Thompson

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Timothy Yates

The Conversion of the Mori: Years of Religious and Social Change, 1814-1842

Richard Fox Young, Editor

India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on UnderstandingHistorical, Theological, and Bibliographicalin Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg

Race and Redemption

British Missionaries Encounter Pacific Peoples, 17901920

Jane Samson

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

2017 Jane Samson

All rights reserved

Published 2017

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 171 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-0-8028-7535-8

eISBN 978-1-4674-4883-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Samson, Jane, 1962 author.

Title: Race and redemption : British missionaries encounter Pacific peoples, 17901920 / Jane Samson.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, [2017] | Series: Studies in the history of Christian missions | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026282 | ISBN 9780802875358 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Missions, BritishIslands of the PacificHistory.

Classification: LCC BV3640 .S26 2017 | DDC 266.0099dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026282

Contents

Like all books that have taken far too long to write, this one has incurred numerous longstanding debts. My first thanks must go to Brian Stanley for encouraging me to take my research in the direction of missionary studies. Brians pioneering directorships of the North Atlantic Missiology Project and the Currents in World Christianity program have made a sustained impact on the scholarly study of missions, and his editorship (with Bob Frykenberg) of the Studies in Christian Mission series at Eerdmans has given a home to many of the results. I owe Brian and Bob many thanks for their enduring patience, and I am also grateful to anonymous reviewers for many helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript. Any remaining errors are my own.

I must also thank the staff at the Alexander Turnbull Special Collections Library at the National Library of New Zealand, the Church Missionary Society collection at the University of Birmingham, the Hocken Special Collections Library at the University of Otago, the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales, the Rhodes House Library, and the Special Collections room at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Thanks also to the Australian Board of Missions for permission to consult their archives at the Mitchell. Above all I am grateful to the late Arthur Easton, whose death in 2009 deprived both the Mitchell Library and the scholarly world of his remarkable expertise and kindness. Tony Ballantyne, John Barker, Tolly Bradford, Helen Gardner, John Gascoigne, Brian Gobbett, Thorgeir Kolshus, Michael Scott, Sujit Sivasundaram, and many others have given me invaluable advice at various points in the history of this lengthy project. Because personal circumstances made extensive research in the antipodes or the UK impossible, I must also thank the librarians at my own university for helping me to obtain interloan material. As usual, I owe special thanks to Sara Joynes, formerly of the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP), who has once again provided invaluable expertise and friendship. AJCP and Pacific Manuscripts Bureau (PMB) staff in Australia were also tremendously helpful. A number of students assisted me formally at various stages of the project, and I am grateful to them all: Rebecca Adell, Dawn Berry, Paul Hengstler, David Luesink, and Nathan Lysons. I would also like to thank all members of my senior undergraduate seminars for years of invigorating discussion.

Although the research for this publication began many years earlier, the book was written in the post9/11 North America. Most of my work up to that point had struggled to recognize those who sought humanity in one another amidst the unequal power relations of the British Empire, especially those who considered themselves to be Christian humanitarians. As phones rang off the hook in religious studies and history departments around North America amid talk of a clash of civilizations, it was clear that the power of religious identities and their appropriation had never gone away despite the predictions of secularization theorists. Urgent new questions surrounded whether or not these identities inevitably produce an alienated Other or whether there could be grounds for communication and mutual respect.