Examining Missionary Writings: Promoting or Subverting Imperialism

Abstract

Postcolonial studies have focused much of their attention on critiquing imperialism and its repercussions. In this process charges have been levelled not only against the imperialists, who are the primary agents in establishing this colossal exploitative enterprise, but also on informal agents like missionaries who were also present at the scene during that period. This study aims to analyse the persistent debate over the part played by the missionaries in the consolidation of the empire by analysing select missionary writings to prove whether these incriminate them or stand antithetical to colonialism as a digressive mechanism. For this purpose, the paper closely scrutinizes Social Christianity in the Orient: The Story of a Man, a Mission and a Movement, the autobiography of John Everett Clough an American Baptist Missionary, to investigate whether or not missionary writings extend as imperialist discourses. The surfacing of multiple conflicting impulses in these writings, problematise a simplistic categorisation of it as a pure imperialistic discourse.