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The explosive expansion of Christianity in Africa and Asia during the last two centuries constitutes one of the most remarkable cultural transformations in the history of mankind. Because it coincided with the spread of European economic and political hegemony, it tends to be taken for granted that Christian missions went hand in hand with imperialism and colonial conquest. In this book historians survey the relationship between Christian missions and the British Empire from the seventeenth century to the 1960s and treat the subject thematically, rather than regionally or chronologically. Many of these themes are treated at length for the first time, relating the work of missions to language, medicine, anthropology, and decolonization. Other important chapters focus on the difficult relationship between missionaries and white settlers, women and mission, and the neglected role of the indigenous evangelists who did far more than European or North American missionaries to spread the Christian religion - belying the image of Christianity as the 'white man's religion'.
The idea that Christian missions went hand in hand with Imperialism and colonial conquest is challenged in this book. By showing the variety of missions and the vital role played by indigenous men and women, the text places missions in a long historical perspective.
Orb and Sceptre brings together recent cutting-edge work on British imperialism by Australian researchers closely associated with Norman Etherington, one of Australia's most eminent scholars in this field. Orb and Sceptre reflects the trajectory of British Empire history in the academy over the last forty years. Demands for new nationalist histories for decolonised territories have combined with renewed attention to the role of the periphery in the making and unmaking of empires. This has formed an explosive mix that has blown apart traditional conceptions of Empire and Commonwealth history. The colonial construction of knowledge is a principal theme in Orb and Sceptre. Former colonies and dependencies looked to a fresh generation of historians to write their histories, generally conceived as grand narratives of escape from imperial shackles. At the same time, a new wave of scholars influenced by feminism, neo-Marxism, dependency theory and postcolonialism laid the groundwork for a ren
This book examines the complex history of Adventism in Africa, situating it within the context of African traditions and culture. From a small movement with origins in the United States, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has grown worldwide. It is one of several Christian denominations present in Africa and yet the history of Seventh-day Adventism in the global South has been largely unexplored by scholars. The book highlights the discrepancies between western traditions exhibited in the missionary enterprise and African religious systems. It also explores the intricate relation between colonialism and African Adventism in line with established studies in African Christianity. It will be of interest to scholars of religion and theology, particularly church history and mission studies, as well as African studies.
In Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850 - 1913, Lindsay Frederick Braun explores the technical processes and struggles surrounding the creation and maintenance of boundaries and spaces in South Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The precision of surveyors and other colonial technicians lent these enterprises an illusion of irreproachable objectivity and authority, even though the reality was far messier. Using a wide range of archival and printed materials from survey departments, repositories, and libraries, the author presents two distinct episodes of struggle over lands and livelihoods, one from the Eastern Cape and one from the former northern Transvaal. These cases expose the contingencies, contests, and negotiations that fundamentally shaped these changing South African landscapes.
In Bantu Authorities: Apartheid's System of Race and Ethnicity, Veronica Ehrenreich-Risner provides the first holistic study of the Bantu Authorities (BA) system that implemented rural apartheid. The system extended segregation by including ethnos theory to establish underfunded “self-governing” homelands to curb the expense of “native” administration yet retain control of the cheap labor upon which white capital depended. Based on over sixty interviews with Zulus and former commissioners, and archival research, Bantu Authorities proves the primary objective of the system was to protect white capital, with white racial purity secondary. Ehrenreich-Risner argues that the system disrupted the Brownlee tradition of guardianship for commissioners and the tradition of reciprocity for ubukhosi. Bantu Authorities ends by examining the lingering consequences of rural apartheid and asks what rural Africans have gained with majority rule when they remain bound to BA structures.
For over a decade, the world has experienced an accelerating erosion of a language that took hundreds of years to emerge. It is a language ordering time and space with words, such as enlightenment, reason, rationality, modernization, and the most recent by-word, globalization. However, it is a language that has been accompanied by colonialism, imperialism, racism, the exploitation of people and nature, an unequal distribution of the world’s resources, pogroms, genocides, and world wars. There has been a gap between assumptions underlying a visionary ambition and the often-brutal practices that have accompanied it. Moreover, it is a language that expresses European values, with the implicit...
In all its diversity, Christianity has been a powerful force in South African life. From the history of colonial missions, through the development of denominations, to the emergence of African initiated churches, Christianity has assumed a variety of distinctively South African forms. This comprehensive guide offers detailed reviews of over 600 works that have established the importance of Christianity in South African history, society, and religious experience. Of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, cultural anthropology, African Studies, and history, this volume, together with African Traditional Religion in South Africa and Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism in South Africa ...