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When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
said, much of the original form and purpose of special acts of worship survived into the twentieth century. Often the study of colonial society is a search for the new. 22 This book argues that equal attention should be paid to the old and the traditional if the varied character of Britain’s colonial settler societies are to be understood. Focus This subject is large and complex, and there is a need to define a start and end point for the study, as well as geographical focus. Special worship is itself a
, therefore offers us a new way of interpreting the histories of colonial ‘settler’ society. ‘Settled’ in 1840, New Zealand’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), was challenged by the practice of land alienation and land wars of the 1860s–90s. As well as helping to define social class and levels of poverty in the new society, and therefore the formation of the ‘class’ of European vagrants, the vagrancy laws in place from the 1860s can also be considered as an aspect of the regulation of Māori–Pākehā relationships in the wake of the forced mobility of Māori
‘civic virtue’ of colonial settler societies ‘mimicking the grand configurations’ of the metropoles. 3 In 1988 Milton Lewis and Roy Macleod provided the landmark volume Disease, Medicine and Empire , which explored the problem of medicine as part of the imperial project. They argued that the period 1810–1910 was a period of colonial expansion
debates in the world of secular politics. The Church also sat well with the voluntarism that became a notable feature of colonial settler societies. As we have seen, churches merged into the wider colonial associational culture; indeed the Church was commonly described as a ‘voluntary association’. The Church also worked alongside a range of non-state institutions to provide benevolent, charitable and