Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830-1910

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Missionaries and modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830-1910 | Felicity Jensz

Missionaries and modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830-1910

Felicity Jensz

Studies in Imperialism

Manchester University Press

February 2022

9781526152978

288 pages

Many missionary societies established mission schools in the nineteenth century in the British Empire as a means to convert non-Europeans to Christianity. Although the details, differed in various colonial contexts, the driving ideology behind mission schools was that Christian morality was highest form of civilisation needed for non-Europeans to be useful members of colonies under British rule. This comprehensive survey of multi-colonial sites over the long time span clearly describes the missionary paradox that to draw in pupils they needed to provide secular education, but that secular education was seen to lead both to a moral crisis and to anti-British sentiments.

Felicity Jensz is a historian in the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics at the University of Münster, Germany.

Introduction: entangled histories of missionary education

1 ‘Liberal and comprehensive’ education: the Negro Education Grant and Nonconforming missionary societies in the 1830s

2 ‘The blessings of civilization’: the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements)

3 Female education and the Liverpool Missionary Conference of 1860

4 Sustaining and secularising mission schools

5 Missionary lessons for Secular States: the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, 1910

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index

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