The Transformation of the World (191 page)

Religious Pluralism

Conquest brings with it subjects whose religions are different from those of the imperial power. Jews came under the Roman Empire, Coptic Christians under Arab invaders in seventh-century Egypt, Orthodox Christians under Muslim rulers in the Balkans, Aztec polytheists under Catholics, and Irish Catholics under Protestants. Outside the Ottoman Empire—which itself lost much of its Christian population through territorial shrinkage and therefore became more Islamic for demographic reasons alone—there were no longer any Muslim empires in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Muslims formed large population groups in the empires of Britain, Russia, France, the Netherlands, and China. At the latest after the British incorporation of Egypt and large parts of sub-Saharan Africa shaped by Islam, no monarch in the world ruled over as many Muslims as Queen Victoria did; she was also empress of the great majority of Hindus. The British had to govern Buddhist majority populations in Ceylon and Burma, as did the French in Cambodia and Laos. In Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and the South Sea Islands, Europeans only slowly discovered and described the welter of religious forms of expressions with which they were confronted. Their first impression was that the peoples in question had no religion the speak of and were therefore, according to one's point of view, either wide open to Christian missionary work or immune from any “civilizing” mission.
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In the 1860s Edward Burnett Tylor, one of the founders of ethnology, coined the blanket term “animism,” which soon caught on as a neutral replacement for the early modern “idol worship” or “idolatry,” once viewed with horror as the opposite of all forms of monotheism.
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Beneath the regulated surface of the organized “world religions,” every region in the world, including Christian Europe, harbored all manner of superstitions with which the guardians of orthodoxies usually came to some arrangement, even if Enlightenment secularists and religious missionaries disapproved of compromises in principle. In the colonies, there were often complex religious structures by no means subject to clear authority relations. The more that Europeans were accustomed to transparent church hierarchies with vertical chains of command, the harder it was for them to decide where to begin implementing their religious policy amid the “chaos” of orders and fraternities, temples and shrines. The early modern Ottoman state was more successful in this regard. The sultan-caliph insisted on channeling all contact with his non-Muslim subjects through their religious leaders, who enjoyed considerable autonomy within niches of the system assigned to them by agreement. This in turn promoted the grouping of religious
minorities into churches.
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The religious leaders were in some cases brutally held to account. In 1821, when news of the Greek uprising reached Istanbul, the Ottoman government ordered the summary execution of Patriarch Grigorios V, even though he was not implicated in the revolt.

What was the significance of the fact that a larger number of non-Christians came under Christian rule than in any previous century? Although the selfassigned civilizing mission, the main ideological justification of imperial rule, could be easily formulated as a religious duty, the colonial powers almost never pursued an active policy of converting their subjects to Christianity. Provision was made for the spiritual care of European colonizers, and the ritual facade of colonial rule invariably included Christian symbols, but otherwise it made sense to keep the peace by avoiding provocations to the various religious groups in the land. In the late nineteenth century, empires therefore still tended to be structurally neutral in religious matters. After the Great Rebellion, Queen Victoria's Parliament confirmed to the princes and peoples of India that from the following November the Raj would observe the principle of not interfering in the affairs of the country's religious communities.
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Clauses with similar effect were also written into treaties signed after 1870 with the sultans of Malaya. The promises were not always kept, but both the British and the Dutch maneuvered very cautiously in relation to Islam. Of course, the creation of hierarchies and bureaucracies was designed to make it easier in the long run to monitor what was happening in the realm of religion.
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That is how empires have always liked to operate. After the first partition of Poland in 1772, Maria Theresa introduced in Galicia the new function of stateappointed chief rabbi, with the aim that he would keep his coreligionists under reliable supervision.
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In its Tibetan protectorate in the eighteenth century, the Qing government restructured the Lamaist hierarchy and attempted to reshape it into a docile instrument of control. One of the many other methods used to manipulate religious powers without disabling them was intervention in the filling of offices—in the same way that European governments valued having a say in the choice of Catholic bishops. Muslim subjects were particularly difficult to handle, partly because many of them had contacts as businessmen or pilgrims beyond the frontiers of the colony. Colonial powers therefore thought it advisable to isolate “their” Muslims from the rest of the community of believers and to limit their opportunities for a pilgrimage to Mecca.
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In seeking to maintain contact with “reliable” religious leaders, imperial administrators could sometimes land themselves in a paradoxical situation. In the Islamic world, for example, mystical Sufi orders were rather suspect as partners in cooperation; functionaries preferred to deal with sedentary local authorities that behaved in a reasonably “rational” manner. But in Senegal the French gradually learned before 1914 that, in the interests of internal order, it made more sense to collaborate not with “chiefs” but with marabouts, the somewhat intractable spiritual leaders of the Sufi brotherhoods, who were less corrupt, more respected
by the population, and therefore more likely to get things done.
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Whether in the British, Russian, or French Empire, religious policy was a constant and unavoidable concern of the colonial state; any mistakes could trigger unrest that was very difficult to subdue. The whole of nineteenth-century imperial history, including that of Qing China, is shot through with fears of a Muslim revolt. In the Western perception, the “revolt of Islam”—the memorable title of a long poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818), which actually deals more with the French Revolution—began not with the triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 or the events of September 11, 2001, but with the militant Muslim movements around the year 1800.

Empires have always intervened in one way or another in the religious topography and hierarchy of their colonies, but they have seldom altered them fundamentally. Forced conversions or baptisms happened here and there but were generally considered undesirable and prohibited. Outside its own colonies, however, a major European power might deliberately stir things up by intervening to protect a Christian minority within an Oriental empire. Russia did this with the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, and France with the Christians in the mountain areas of Lebanon—in both cases triggering complications that led to war—and Sultan Abdülhamid II, for his part, declared himself the protector of all Muslims living under Christian rule. It was German strategy to incite religious, ethnic, or protonational minorities against the British Empire during the First World War, and the British did the same against the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the memorable exploits of T. H. Lawrence “of Arabia.”
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It had already been tried out in the Anglo-Russian Great Game of the nineteenth century.

Missionaries: Motives and Driving Forces

One of the main lines of global religious history in the nineteenth century is the rise and fall of Christian missions.
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In the early modern period, although European missions had huge cultural consequences—notably the role of Jesuits as a bridge between Europe and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—they remained quantitatively modest. Mass conversions in Asia were neither desired nor tolerated by European colonial powers or indigenous rulers; Africa was still outside the sphere of missionary operations. Of the million or so people who went to Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the Dutch East India Company, only a thousand were men of the cloth—and their main task was to fight off the competition from Catholicism.
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In contrast, the nineteenth century saw a major development of missions to Christianize large populations or even whole peoples. This was a Protestant phenomenon, which—with an antecedent around 1700, in the mission of German Pietists from Halle to the Danish colony of Tranquebar in Southeast India—developed first in Britain, and a little later in the United States, out of the surplus energies of the evangelical revival. In contrast to early modern attempts to win foreign rulers to the Christian faith, it involved a mission to the “pagan” masses. If we
were to name a starting date, it would be not so much the year when a particular organization was founded (Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, the originally nondenominational London Missionary Society in 1795, or the Anglican Church Missionary Society in 1799) as the opening of British India to missionaries in the new East India Company charter of 1813. From that point on, merchants and missionaries appeared in growing numbers in the Subcontinent; the markets for goods and for souls now mirrored each other. As always, however, selling beliefs was more difficult than peddling material goods. Tiny groups of initial converts were instrumental in igniting “explosions of spiritual energy … that brought whole communities into the new faith.”
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The second major missionary region in Asia, the Chinese Empire, was opened up in 1858–60 by several “unequal” treaties, after a period since 1807 when missionaries had been working in restrictive and dangerous conditions out of the Canton trading post and the Portuguese enclave of Macau.
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In 1900 there were roughly two thousand missionaries in the whole of China.

In Africa the missionary presence took longer to establish itself and was more decentralized, beginning around 1800 in the south and west of the continent. Here, of course, there was no central government to regulate access, so that by mid-century the whole spectrum of Protestant orientations and churches was represented. In the 1870s, on the eve of the great European invasion, missionary activity increased again, and a little later it became caught up in the wake of military conquests that were advantageous but also created new problems for it.
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The Catholic mission—which, like the Roman Church in general, took a long time to recover from the Age of Revolution—followed a few decades later, sustained mainly by the ambitions of Napoleon III in international and colonial politics. By 1870 it was active worldwide, and the much more numerous Protestant missionaries looked upon it as a dangerous rival.

Much was new in the nineteenth-century Protestant mission. Its basic purpose was to save thousands—or in China, as its propaganda tirelessly proclaimed, millions—of souls from eternal damnation. It mobilized tens of thousands of men and women, who were often ill prepared for hazardous and often materially unrewarding service in remote tropical areas. Martyrdom also was still a possibility; more than two hundred missionaries and family members lost their lives during the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion in China. Missionary work was a huge achievement on the part of a quite special “civil society” organization resting on voluntary initiative. Most of the Protestant societies in question relied on donations and set great store by their independence of the state and church hierarchies. Indeed, they were the very first organizations to elevate fundraising to a fine art. Sponsors in the home country had to be continually humored, remotivated, and persuaded of the spiritual benefits of their mundane investment. Missionary activity also involved a combination of business and logistical planning.

Mission history is today a huge research field, which easily merges with the history of Christianity outside Europe. What went on between missionaries and
natives is increasingly seen as a symmetrical interaction and is elucidated from more than one viewpoint.
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One particularly controversial question, to which no general answer can be given, is whether and how missionaries were “accomplices” of imperial expansion and colonial rule. The extraordinary spread of missionary activity is, of course, unthinkable outside the wider context of European global conquest, and there are many cases where missionary penetration into a well-known region followed its political appropriation. Missionaries were often direct beneficiaries of imperial protection. They belonged to “white society” in the colonies—but at a low level of prestige, at least in the British case, since their typically petit bourgeois habits made them appear out of place in elite circles. On the other hand, missionaries pursued objectives of their own that did not always overlap with those of a colonial state to which they definitely did not belong. Often they were at odds with the aims of private settlers too. From the point of view of the colonial state, missionaries were welcome if they built schools and provided as much as possible of the funding for them. The enthusiasm of governors or (in a noncolonial country like China) consuls was far less profuse if missionaries “irresponsibly” sowed unrest among the indigenous population and then expected a European government representative to bail them out. Where nationalist aspirations appeared in the open, individual missionaries were invariably suspected of backing them.

The numerous missionary societies varied in their theological beliefs and in their objectives, methods, and willingness to take risks. It made a difference whether one wore Chinese dress (as members of the fundamentalist China Inland Mission did) and tried to spread the word of God in a provincial village backwater, or whether one stuck to European sartorial markers and concentrated one's efforts in higher education and the provision of health care in the cities. Nineteenth-century missionaries were scarcely less cosmopolitan than their distant precursors in the Jesuit order of the early modern period. English-speaking evangelism had from the outset been a transatlantic project, and missionary work in faraway places often bridged doctrinal conflicts and strengthened ecumenism. Missionaries from continental Europe had their own societies but were also to be found working in the Anglo-Saxon organizations. It was rare for a missionary society to be composed only of one country's nationals, and, at least during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, national identity did not play a primary role for missionaries. At the same time, many had no reason to commit themselves to the imperial ambitions of a foreign government. In its early days, the Church Missionary Society employed more Germans and Swiss than British.
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In 1914, when national tendencies had become stronger, more than a tenth of the 5,400 Protestant missionaries active in India still came from continental Europe.
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