Baptist Missions in the British Empire: Jamaica and Serampore in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Kelly Rebecca Elliott
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2007 Baptist Missions in the British Empire: Jamaica and Serampore in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Kelly Rebecca Elliott Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BAPTIST MISSIONS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE: JAMAICA AND SERAMPORE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY By KELLY REBECCA CROSS ELLIOTT A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Kelly Elliott All rights reserved The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Kelly R. Elliott defended on 22 March 2007. ________________________ Charles J. Upchurch Professor Directing Thesis ________________________ Bawa S. Singh Committee Member ________________________ Darrin M. McMahon Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to the unflagging support, constructive criticism, and encouragement of Professor Charles Upchurch. His advice has vastly improved this project and given me a vision for its future. I also appreciate the support and comments of Professor Bawa Singh and Professor Darrin McMahon. I am grateful for Chris Pignatiello’s patient assistance in answering all of my logistical questions. Portions of this work related to Jamaica were presented at the 2007 Gulf Coast Colonialist Colloquium in New Orleans, Louisiana, where I received helpful comments from a Caribbean perspective. Finally, in this as in everything, Jeremy Elliott has been my strongest supporter. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract v THE DISSENTING TRADITION IN ENGLAND 1 THE JAMAICA MISSION, PART ONE 26 THE SERAMPORE MISSION, PART ONE 54 THE JAMAICA MISSION, PART TWO 86 THE SERAMPORE MISSION, PART TWO 109 CONCLUSIONS: MISSIONS AND EMPIRE 142 Bibliography 169 Biographical Sketch 175 iv ABSTRACT Baptist missions in the British Empire must be understood in the context of the Dissenting tradition in England, including Baptist history, theology, epistemology, radical politics, and class considerations. The Baptist missions at Serampore, in British Bengal, from 1794 to 1837, and in Jamaica from C. 1824 to 1850 provide ideal case studies through which to examine missionary identity formation, as well as the impact of missions on the Empire. British Baptist missionaries, already marginalized in England as Dissenters and artisan-class men, faced powerful challenges to their individual identities and loyalties in the mission field. In both India and Jamaica, white missionaries tended to identify more with non-white converts than with their fellow colonials. This shift led the Baptists studied here to ground their identities and loyalties in their mission and in their churches, rather than in the British Empire. Baptist missionaries thus viewed themselves primarily as Christians and Dissenters, not as English and white, and placed allegiance to their churches before English nationalism. The white missionaries who began the missions at Serampore and in Jamaica ultimately entrusted the future of their work to non-white converts. In both cases, the goal of evangelization was an independent church led by indigenous Christians. v Through the medium of their and your struggles, we read the Acts and the Epistles, as it were, with new eyes, and seem to behold as in a mirror the Christianity of the early ages. We can truly say of you, dear brethren, and both we and you of them, “now we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord!” --Andrew Fuller to first Baptist missionaries in India 1 THE DISSENTING TRADITION IN ENGLAND In 1792 in the small town of Kettering, in northern England, a group of fourteen Baptist tradesmen and ministers founded the Baptist Missionary Society, collecting a subscription of thirteen pounds, two shillings and sixpence to begin the work of overseas evangelization. The Reverend Andrew Fuller, a founding member, later recalled, “When we began, in 1792, there was little or no respectability among us, not so much as a squire to sit in the chair, or an orator to address him with speeches.”2 The reputation and respectability of the Baptist denomination itself was little better: as Dissenters from the Established Church, Baptists regularly incurred the wrath of the largely Anglican British elite. Baptist chapels, strongest in Northern commercial towns like Birmingham and Northampton, and filled with artisans, shopkeepers, journeymen, and petty professionals, contrasted starkly with the wealthy Anglican cathedrals of London and York and their Oxbridge-educated, often titled parishioners. Disdained by political and religious authority, the Baptists commended themselves to a higher authority and a larger purpose. Their unique worldview, moored in specific theological beliefs and working class backgrounds, often alienated them from other Englishmen. Yet the nineteenth century saw the Baptists gain powerful friends in Parliament, win legislative victories at the forefront of the day’s major social and political questions, and ultimately, enjoy the repeal of the very laws that disbarred them from participation in British governance and privilege. These triumphs at home went hand-in-hand with Baptist successes abroad, mostly achieved through the Baptist Missionary Society, whose inauspicious origins belied its ultimate influence. As many historians have acknowledged, the changing fortunes of the Baptists in England and their missionaries in the Empire form a critical thread in the larger British 1 John Clark Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward. Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission, 2 vol. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1859), vol. I, 154 2 Marshman, I, 17 1 imperial narrative. Many scholars have applied themselves to the study and analysis of the “colonial encounter” within the missionary context, and much of the current historiography acknowledges the influential role missionaries played in shaping imperial politics and society. Some historians point to the benevolence and education the missionaries brought to the colonized; but the majority of recent work sees the missionary enterprise as a venture whose discourses, often characterized by constructions of cultural and racial dominance, were bound up in imperialism.3 Much of this scholarship emphasizes the immediate social and political contexts in which the missionaries worked, but overlooks long-term influences such as Baptist history and class background, and particularly Dissenting doctrine. This focus on the power, influence, and control white missionaries exercised over converts, present in much of the current scholarship, tends to minimize the role native Christians played in the creation and maintenance of a viable, evangelical church. Thus both missionaries and colonial converts are maligned by such an approach. I argue, rather, that the actions of Baptist missionaries in the British Empire must be grounded in their own theology and worldview. A thorough comprehension of the goals, assumptions, doctrine, socio-economic backgrounds, and political history of this religious group within Britain is critical to understanding why the missionaries behaved as they did in the colonial setting. Recent scholarship, including Catherine Hall’s excellent and otherwise thorough work on the Baptists in Jamaica in the 1830s and 1840s, fails to provide this context and thus comes to questionable conclusions regarding the missionary enterprise and its effects in the Empire. An approach which foregrounds the Baptist worldview—history, theology, and political and class relationships—and 3 See E. Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793-1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Christians in India: An Historical Overview of Their Complex Origins” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003) for examples of the former, and Catherine Hall’s work on the Baptists in Jamaica in Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Press, 2002), “Gender and Ethnicity in the 1830s and 1840s” in White, Male, and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), and “White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica” History Workshop Journal 36 (1993) for the latter. Other important recent work on missions in the empire includes Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), Emilia Viotti Da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag. Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990). 2 places Baptist missions within their own context is also needed to gain a balanced and comprehensive understanding of the relationship between missions and empire. Such an approach leads to significant conclusions about the ways missionaries viewed themselves and their mission, the place of missions