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Cambridge University Press978-0-521-19410-5 - God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908Hilary M. CareyFrontmatterMore information

God’s Empire

In God’s Empire, Hilary M. Carey charts Britain’s nineteenth- century transformation from Protestant nation to free Christian empire through the history of the colonial missionary movement. This wide-ranging reassessment of the religious character of the second British empire provides a clear account of the promotional strategies of the major churches and church parties which worked to plant set-tler Christianity in British domains. Based on extensive use of ori-ginal archival and rare published sources, the author explores major debates such as the relationship between religion and colonisation, Church–state relations, Irish Catholics in the empire, the impact of the Scottish Disruption on colonial Presbyterianism, and competi-tion between Evangelicals and other Anglicans in the colonies, and between British and American strands of Methodism in British North America.

h i l a ry m. c a r e y is a professor of History at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, and Life Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is the edited collec-tion, Empires of Religion (2008).

http://www.cambridge.org/9780521194105

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God’s EmpireReligion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908

Hilary M. Carey






c a m b r i d g e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City

Cambridge University PressThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521194105

© Hilary M. Carey 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication dataCarey, Hilary M. (Hilary Mary), 1957–

God’s Empire : Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 / Hilary M. Carey. p. cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-521-19410-51. Great Britain – Church history – 19th century. I. Title.BR759.C365 2010270.09171′24109034–dc222010045718

ISBN 978-0-521-19410-5 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.






In loving memory of Guy Alexander Beange 1923–2004






vii

List of figures page ixList of maps xList of tables xiPreface and acknowledgments xiiiList of abbreviations xvii

Part I God’s empire 1

1 Colonialism, colonisation and Greater Britain 3 2 Protestant nation to Christian empire, 1801–1908 40

Part II Colonial missionary societies 73

Introduction: colonial mission 75 3 Anglicans 84 4 Catholics 114 5 Evangelical Anglicans 148 6 Nonconformists 177 7 Presbyterians 206

Part III Colonial clergy 245

8 Clergy 247 9 St Augustine’s College, Canterbury 27110 Missionary College of All Hallows,

Drumcondra (Dublin) 287

Part IV Promised lands 305

Introduction: emigrants and colonists 30711 Christian colonisation and its critics 311

Contents






viii Contents

12 Colonies 341Conclusion 371

Bibliography 381Index 410






ix

1.1 Population of British origin in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa compared with Ireland and Scotland. page 20

Figure






x

Maps

1.1 British empire, 1815 page xix1.2 British empire, 1914 xx1.3 British North America, 1867 xxi1.4 Australia and New Zealand, 1900 xxii1.5 South Africa, showing British possessions, July 1885 xxiii

12.1 Diocese of Christchurch, New Zealand, in the late nineteenth century 354






xi

Tables

1.1 Populations of England, Scotland, Ireland and major settler colonies, 1801–1911 page 19

1.2 Canada: principal religious denominations of the population, 1871–1901 32

1.3 Australia: principal religious denominations of the population, 1891, 1901 33

1.4 Cape Colony: church membership and ethnicity, 1898 341.5 New Zealand: principal religious denominations of the

population, 1891–1911 351.6 Australia and New Zealand: proportions of religious

denominations in Australia and New Zealand according to census years 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 36

3.1 Colonial missionary societies and auxiliaries 783.2 SPG: summary of the missionary roll, 1701–1900 863.3 Anglican colonial and missionary bishoprics, 1900 1103.4 SPG: income from general and other sources, 1801–1910 1124.1 British and world receipts (French francs) to the Society

for the Propagation of the Faith, 1840, 1854–1860 1314.2 Chronology of Catholic dioceses in Britain and settler

colonies up to 1908 1455.1 Income of the Newfoundland School Society (NSS), Colonial

Church Society (CCS), Colonial Church and School Society (CCSS), and Colonial and Continental Church Society (CCCS), 1831–1909 173

7.1 Summary of Congregational collections, Presbyterian Church of Ireland, 1890–2 229

7.2 Receipts on the Schemes of the Free Church of Scotland, 1842–5 234

7.3 Receipts for the Colonial Scheme of the Church of Scotland, 1868–85 238

8.1 Number of clergy, ministers and priests in England and Wales for census years 1841, 1881 and 1911 250






List of tablesxii

8.2 Relative percentage distribution of the clerical, legal, medical and teaching professions in the British empire, including subordinate occupations, 1901 251

8.3 Anglican missionary colleges and training institutions supported by the SPG and number of students ordained, 1754–1900 267

9.1 St Augustine’s College, Canterbury. summary table of graduate destinations 281

9.2 St Augustine’s College, Canterbury. dioceses of sailing, 1849–1904 285

10.1 Irish missionary seminaries 29010.2 All Hallows College, summary of destinations of

matriculants, 1842–91 29110.3 Carlow College, destinations of alumni 29310.4 All Hallows College, destination dioceses of matriculants,

1842–1900 30012.1 Race and religion in the Province of Canterbury,

New Zealand, 1857 358






xiii

While I was conducting research for this book, it was reported that students at one of the Cambridge colleges had been obliged to abandon the chosen theme for their May Ball, which was ‘Empire’. Protestors who set up a Facebook site objected that the British empire continued to be a ‘highly sensitive subject’ for many people and that it was inap-propriate to use it as the theme for a light-hearted event.

As heirs to the legacy of the British empire, British prime ministers have been divided on the need to give an account of their moral stew-ardship. In 2007, Tony Blair apologised on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade; others said the time for apolo-gies was past.1 In the former colonies, there is also a mixed picture. While former Prime Minister John Howard refused to make any apol-ogy to the Australian Aborigines on the ground that his administration had played no role in their original colonisation and dispossession, his successor made an official apology to the ‘stolen generations’ one of his first acts on coming to power. Along with church leaders of many denominations, Pope Benedict XVI would appear to side with the apol-ogisers, and, in May 2007, reflecting on his visit to Brazil, he lamented the injustice that had often accompanied Christian missions.

So why does the mere idea of empire now attract division when, a little over a hundred years ago, imperial church gatherings, such as the Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908 (discussed in the final chapter) capti-vated the London metropole?

This book sets out to answer this question from a particular point of view – that of the colonial missionary movement. It examines a set of ideas that rose and fell with the mass flow of people from Great Britain and Ireland to colonies in British North America, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa in the nineteenth century. It concerns the institutions which were created by the churches to support the dias-pora, including the colonial committees, colonial missionary societies,

Preface and acknowledgments

1 P. Brendon, ‘A Moral Audit of the British Empire’, History Today, 57 (2007), p. 44.






Preface and acknowledgmentsxiv

missionary colleges, missionary periodicals, and memoirs published by colonial clergy in their retirement. It was a large movement, even if it was not so large as either the foreign missionary movement, or those moral and humanitarian campaigns, including anti-slavery, temper-ance and labour reform, which also engaged the British churches at about the same time. Colonial missions were conservative: they helped to sustain bonds of allegiance and unite them in what they perceived to be a great spiritual and moral enterprise. However, they also helped to perpetuate the old animosities between Protestant and Catholic, estab-lished and Free Church, liberal and conservative, that had character-ised churches in Britain.

Colonial churches therefore laboured under a double burden. They were central signifiers of older religious nationalisms, sectarianism and ethnicities, even as these things were breaking down under the multiple impacts of constitutional reform, emigration, colonisation and nation-building. At the same time, they were required to nurture the more tol-erant, liberal and democratic values, which included the absence of an established Church and hereditary privilege, which would eventually be seen as hallmarks of the new Britains of the second British empire. Indeed, if they were to survive and meet the needs of new nations, rather than their home congregations in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, colonial missions had to sow the seeds of national churches in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and other former settler colonies.

Each church met this challenge within different spiritual and rhet-orical strategies: some by strengthening the union of the British or Anglo-Saxon race, others by celebrating their escape from it, some by denouncing the colonial enterprise, others by colluding with it. Assisted by generous public and private funding, the solutions they devised gave the religious character to what some liked to call ‘Greater Britain’ and which these days we tend to call the ‘British world’. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the critical exception of South Africa, the dominions that made up the British world formed the loyal, white, Christian counterpart to the former colonies of settlement that had once rejected the bond with Britain – the United States. The churches were essential to the creation of a Christian consensus which supported the expansion of the British world through the planting of religious institutions in every conceivable corner of the empire.

The structure of this book generally follows a chronological trajec-tory though there are many thematic meanderings along the way. The first section begins by defining some terms and providing a survey of the major events which impacted on the religious affairs of the colonies






Preface and acknowledgments xv

in the nineteenth century. The second section, on colonial missions, is divided between Anglicans, Catholics, Evangelical Anglicans, Nonconformists and Presbyterians, and gives an account of all the major colonial missionary societies: the (Anglican) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the (Catholic) Association for the Propagation of the Faith (APF), the (Evangelical Anglican) Colonial and Continental Missionary Society (CCMS), the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), the (Congregationalist) Colonial Church Society (CCS) and the Colonial Schemes of the Free and established Church of Scotland. Since, apart from the SPG, most of these societies have not had the benefit of their own individual scholarly histories, this has required quite a lot of narrative compression of the printed and archival sources. It also led to some chronological overlap, but it did seem to make the best sense to follow this arrangement so I stuck with it. The third section concerns the colonial clergy – or at least their training in the two colleges that were specifically set up for this purpose in Ireland and England. There were others in the colonies, as well as the Irish College in Rome, which performed similar work; however, I have had less to say about them. The final section takes the colonial missionary movement to the promised lands of colonial settlement and looks at religious schemes of colonisation, especially those to New Zealand, and the controversy aroused by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his theory of systematic colonisation. It concludes with the Britannia or Barr colony, which was established in Saskatchewan during the last great imperial land boom in the Canadian wheat lands of the northwest.

I would like to acknowledge a number of intellectual and institu-tional debts that I have incurred while writing this book. The original idea for God’s Empire germinated while I was writing a chapter for Australia’s Empire, the companion volume to the Oxford History of the British Empire, edited by Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward. At this time, I was in Dublin where I was serving a term as Keith Cameron Professor of Australian History at University College Dublin. Some of the ideas which find their way expanded into this volume began with discussions at the conference I organised with Hugh McLeod in Dublin in 2006.2 It is also a book written from the perspective of Newcastle, the second city of New South Wales, where I have worked since 1991. In a multicultural and post-colonial nation like Australia, Newcastle’s Victorian city centre and the cultural resilience of its former settler churches has become something of a rarity. While successive waves of

2 H. M. Carey, ed., Empires of Religion, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series (Basingstoke, 2008).






Preface and acknowledgmentsxvi

new arrivals from around the globe have changed other imperial cities beyond recognition, the overall religious mix in Newcastle continues to preserve something of the character of its founding British churches. I have found it a good place to reflect on the complexities of the post-colonial world, in which cities, nations, churches and their people have been energetic in reinventing themselves and turning their backs on the imperial past.

Research for this book was funded from 2005 to 2007 by a Discovery Project grant from the Australian Research Council and aided by research leave from the University of Newcastle. Dr Troy Duncan pro-vided exemplary research assistance while busy with his own biography of the seventh Anglican bishop of Newcastle, Francis de Witt Batty. I am grateful to Clare Hall Cambridge and the York Centre for Medieval Studies for accommodating me at various stages during the writing of this book, and to librarians and archivists in the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the Royal Commonwealth Library, the Dublin Diocesan Archives, the National Library of Ireland, the National Library of Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland, Lambeth Palace Library, the London Guildhall Library, Rhodes House Library Oxford, the Borthwick Institute York, Auckland City Library, Canterbury City Library New Zealand, the State Library of New South Wales and the Tasmanian State Archives, for their assistance. While I claim respon-sibility for all blemishes that remain, I feel especially indebted to Colin Barr and David Hilliard for sharing their knowledge of imperial reli-gious history with me and rescuing me from innumerable blunders of fact and interpretation. For reading drafts, answering queries and pro-viding me with many insights that had escaped my attention, I also thank Bernard Carey, John Gascoigne, Edward James, Stuart Piggin and Deryck Schreuder.

My final debt, one I cannot repay, is to my father, Guy Alexander Beange, who passed away just when I was getting started on this book. Although he never showed the slightest interest in his family history, I like to think he would have enjoyed reading about the background to the decision by his ancestor, Alexander Beange, who chose to leave the family farm in Aberdeen in 1860 and try his luck in the province pio-neered by Free Church settlers in the south island of New Zealand.

Hilary M. Carey University of Newcastle, NSW






xvii

Annals Annals of the Propagation of the FaithAPF Association for the Propagation of the Faith (Oeuvre de

la propagation de la foi)CCCS Colonial and Continental Church SocietyCCS Colonial Church SocietyCMS Church Missionary SocietyCOS CC Church of Scotland Colonial CommitteeDDA Dublin Diocesan ArchivesFCOS CC Free Church of Scotland Colonial CommitteeLMS London Missionary SocietyNGK Dutch Reformed ChurchNSS Newfoundland School SocietySPCK Society for Promoting Christian KnowledgeSPG Society for the Propagation of the GospelSSPCK Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian

KnowledgeWMMS Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society

Abbreviations






xviii

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Map 1.5 South Africa, showing British possessions, July 1885




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