Pacifying Missions provides the first sustained examination of peace and missionary work in the context of the British Empire. It interrogates diverse missionary projects from Africa and the Pacific region, unfolding a variegated world of ideas, discourses, and actions. The volume yields compelling evidence for a reconsideration of peace as a vital focus for analysis in the history of Christian mission. It also reveals a landscape of peace that was plural, dynamic, and contested, worked out in specific contexts, and deeply entangled with understandings and experiences of violence.
Contributors to this volume are: Geoffrey Troughton, Elizabeth Elbourne, Jane Samson, David Maxwell, Norman Etherington, Esme Cleall, Amy Stambach, Joanna Cruickshank, and Bronwyn Shepherd.
Geoffrey Troughton, Ph.D. (2008), Massey University, is Associate Professor and Programme Director of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His major publications include New Zealand Jesus (2011), Saints and Stirrers (2017), and Pursuing Peace in Godzone (2018).
Preface
Notes on Contributors
1 Missions, Peace, and Empire in the Nineteenth Century
Geoffrey Troughton
2 Peace, Genocide, and Empire: The London Missionary Society and the San in Early Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa Elizabeth Elbourne
3 Te Ngara’s Journey: The Gospel of Peace and the Melanesian Mission Jane Samson
4 Maori Christianity, Missions, and the State in New Zealand Wars of the 1860s Norman Etherington
5 Not Peace but a Sword: Missionaries, Humanitarianism, and Slavery in Late Nineteenth-Century Central Africa David Maxwell
6 John Mackenzie’s “True Vision of the Future”: Imagining Peace in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa Esme Cleall
7 “In the Interest of Peace, the Society Yielded”: Mission Growth and Retreat in Moshi-Kilimanjaro Amy E. Stambach
8 Missionaries, Peacemaking, and the “Meeting of Laws” in Australia Joanna Cruickshank and Bronwyn Shepherd
9 Missions and Peace in Prospect Geoffrey Troughton
Index
Pacifying Missions will be of interest and relevance to students and scholars of Christian missions and world Christianity, peace and conflict studies, colonialism, the British Empire, and nineteenth-century African and Pacific history.