Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700-1850

Church History, March, 2009 by John Wolffe

Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700-1850. By Rowan Strong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii 325 pp. $110.00 cloth.

This book provides an analysis of Anglican attitudes toward empire, based centrally on printed sources relating to the two major Church of England missionary societies, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in 1701, and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded in 1799. There is an initial useful survey of the literature that highlights particularly the relative scholarly neglect hitherto of the SPG during the eighteenth century. Two very long chapters follow, accounting between them for more than half the book. The first discusses Anglican attitudes toward North America in the eighteenth century, drawing particularly on the sequence of annual SPG sermons, and the second examines the development of Church views and policy toward India between 1790 and 1830. A much shorter chapter then describes the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund in 1840-1841, and the final main chapter explores the development of Anglicanism in Australia and New Zealand during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Strong's central conclusion is that "there were aspects of a theological construction of empire that persisted throughout the century and a half under investigation" (285). These included a sharp sense of moral and spiritual polarity between Christians and "heathen" (including the adherents of South Asian religions), although it was recognized that degenerate Anglicans among the colonizers could be counterproductive as representatives of Christianity. The acquisition of Britain's overseas possessions was a mark of divine favor and providential purpose that implied a corresponding national obligation to God to engage in mission to nominal Christians and non-Christians. As the principal state church, the Church of England was primarily responsible for the discharge of that responsibility. Toward the end of Strong's period, however, the loosening of ties between church and state inherent in the "constitutional revolution" (284) of 1828-1832 led to the advocacy of self-governing colonial churches rather than the earlier vision of integrated imperial Anglicanism as the most realistic means to achieving that end. Australia, Strong suggests, was the most important early exemplification of this new paradigm.

The book's limitation to printed and largely metropolitan sources permits clarity of analysis and useful chronological and geographical breadth, but it comes at a price. The views presented are very much those of an official and predominantly episcopal leadership, and there are only limited glimpses of the perspectives of rank-and-file supporters in England, or of chaplains and missionaries on the ground in North America, India, and Australasia. While one sympathizes with Strong's logistical difficulties in carrying out archival research from an institutional base in Perth, Australia, some attention to the rich surviving manuscript records of the SPG and the CMS would have added important nuance to his account. It would also have been helpful to have given more comparative attention to the views on empire of the other missionary societies founded in the 1790s, for example the Baptist Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society, in order to clarify the extent to which the views described were specifically Anglican as opposed to exemplifying a broader British Protestant consensus.

There are quite a few factual and typographical errors that, although trivial in themselves, are sufficiently numerous to somewhat weaken confidence in the rigor of the book as a whole. For example, Charles Sumner was bishop of Winchester, not Worcester (136), John Angell James was a Congregationalist, not a Baptist (181), Henry Phillpotts's name is misspelled (217, 320), and William Van Mildert, described as "young" in 1822 (177), was in fact 57 in that year. Most seriously, Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts are both misdated and the sequence of events in 1828 to 1832 thus misunderstood (213).

There is much that is very worthwhile in this book, particularly in the thorough exposition of SPG attitudes in the eighteenth century, and in the lucid and well-informed account of the early development of Anglicanism in Australasia. Nevertheless, a narrow source base and a degree of carelessness mean that an opportunity to provide a definitive treatment of this important subject has been missed.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640709000304

John Wolffe

The Open University