Search results
maintenance and expansion of the British Empire. The seamen’s welfare movement considered sailors’ mobility vital to the growth of Christianity in non-Christian foreign cultures, not just through the transport of missionaries and religious tracts, but through the converted sailors’ own agency as Christian ambassadors. To achieve this goal, these seamen’s welfare organisations looked to current theories regarding the relationship between metropole and peripheries, some confident that their movement would naturally progress from the centre of the empire while others preferred
industrial capitalism and the British Empire since, for London, it was these processes that had produced the nightmarish conditions he described in the East End. In a stark contrast, British social investigators such as William Booth, Charles Booth and C.F.G. Masterman sought to prevent the crumbling of the Empire from within by calling for religious and social reform. However, despite these very different
, and just such were the impressions of a man who had lately opened his eyes upon Africa. 13 Even seasoned missionaries found it difficult to maintain regular timetables. The lack of clocks and watches among the African people beleaguered the Reverend William Shaw’s task of coordinating religious meetings: ‘How are they to know the exact time
missionary texts are curious artefacts. They are profoundly hybrid genres, incorporating ethnography, linguistics, geographical description and surveys, as well as detailed descriptions of evangelical work and native religious customs. These published accounts were drawn from the copious writings of the missionaries in the field: their letters, journals, reports and memoirs formed the
fit, free from the interference of either bishop or presbyter, ‘freer than they had ever been’, as Christopher Hill puts it, ‘free from prosecution for “sin”, free to assemble and discuss in their own congregations’ and to tell the world about it. Independency and a veritable cacophony of more radical variants found voice in the 1640s, not only to construct a rationale for religious toleration but
participation of the people, especially since the introduction first of radio and then of television brought the ceremony directly into the homes of the monarch’s subjects, makes it now more than ever an expression of the community of the realm, transcending differences of class, gender, ethnicity and religious belief. The four Coronations that fall within the scope of this study, those of 1902, 1911, 1937 and
slave trade, and Wesleyans, Evangelicals and others soon followed. Some of the most outspoken and active contributors to the cause were similarly members of religious organisations and they understood antislavery work as their Christian duty. Both Granville Sharp’s legal efforts in the 1760s and the famous Somersett case in 1772 served to publicise slavery as a problem, and as the issue received more
occasions both to impress on their congregations the lessons to be drawn from ‘building up a great Empire’, and to deliver some direct political warnings to the government. The Reverend W. S. Kerr, a prominent educationalist, addressing a packed audience in the Ulster Hall, Belfast, asserted: ‘Ulstermen are taking part in the Empire celebrations under the shadow of a great apprehension of being thrust from
stalwart, who ‘on some frivolous pretext, knocked his wife down with a chair, and beat her … until the chair broke to pieces, and then seized a large stick and continued to beat her’. Mary Carrowan’s life was saved only by the timely intervention of Clement H. Lasssiter, their boarder. Carrowan, known to have enjoyed multiple affairs with married and unmarried women of his congregation, had previously
closely, in 1710 he left Tranquebar and settled in Poreiar, a nearby village where he started eating and dressing like the locals. He acquired many medical palm leaf bundles from the locals, who had information of various diseases, medicines, and herbs, all of which he compiled in his Malabar Medicus. 32 Missionaries like Ziegenbalg, Plütschau and Gründler developed communication with local people as part of their religious duties and in their curiosity for local spiritual instructions. The missionaries maintained