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With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.
Whether in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas or Africa, within Germany’s formal empire or in the imperial spaces of other powers, Germans brought with them assumptions about the nature of extra-European peoples. These assumptions were often subverted, disrupted or overturned by their own experience of frontier interactions, which led some Germans to question European ‘knowledge’ of these non-European peoples. Other Germans, however, signally failed to shift from their earlier assumptions about indigenous people and continued to act in the colonies according to their belief in the innate superiority of Europeans.
Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, the wide ranging research presented in this volume offers historians and anthropologists a clear demonstration of the complexity of frontier zone encounters. It illustrates the variety of forms that agency took for both indigenous peoples and Germans in imperial zones of contact and poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.
missionary heroine or simple domestic helpmeet. Such stereotyping could lead to a misreading of the interplay between mission and home society expectations on the one hand, and women’s agency on the other. Jeffrey Cox has suggested that while both European and Indian women are often absent from missionary histories, in reality ‘missionary’ usually meant a married couple. Narratives of
undoubtedly ‘without precedent in missionary history’. The editor finally settled on a defence based on Brown’s paternal relationship to the Fijian and Samoan teachers – ‘he had led them into peril’. The editorial concluded with an allegory that reinterpreted the events in ‘terms which we can better understand
missionaries, 9 this remains a problem. 10 Why mission scholars are reticent about writing anthropologically or historically about missionaries themselves Beidelman unintentionally acknowledged when remarking that while there have been ‘some highly sophisticated studies of mission by missionaries themselves … none of these writers appears to have had any interest in relating his findings to theories or problems outside the mission community’. 11 In the words of Lovett, missionary history is hardly
redefinition of an erstwhile colonial agent’s memory has, over the centuries, been a function of the needs of successive memory communities–both at the centre and the periphery–is highlighted by Richard Goebelt’s discussion of Lord Clive, the victor of Plassey. John Stuart places his examination of the changing images of the explorer and missionary David Livingstone against the background of British missionary
-hand experience of many indigenous cultures. On 15 June 1904 the Wanganui Chronicle reported the address, ‘People of Other Lands’, given by Bishop Ridley about mission work in British Columbia, which demonstrated the many parallels in the colonial and missionary history of Canada and New Zealand. The Putiki Maori Choir’s opening rendition of When I Survey the Wondrous Cross in Māori prompted the
connection to God that they could feel in their bodies. ‘We don’t practise religion, we do what the Word of God says,’ one pastor told us. Against this, they situated the hollowed out traditions of mainline churches and the pointless worship of materiality for its own ends. Their mission was clear: to grow, prosper, reach out and save souls – an inversion of the missionary history of Ireland in which Africans figured as the souls in need of saving. Material wealth, health and wellbeing, success in education and proper behaviours could all be taken as signs of salvation
of the historiography of missionary history see, for example, Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May, ‘Reappraisals of mission history: An introduction’, in Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May (eds), Missionaries, Indigenous peoples and cultural exchange (Brighton, Portland and Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), pp. 1–9. Important here is also the work of Johan and Jean
interconnected fields of exchange was Alan Lester's Imperial Networks (2001), which reframed nineteenth-century missionary histories as narratives of the transnational construction of new forms of governmentality. 21 His work demonstrated the entanglements of politics in London and the Cape in the first half of the nineteenth century. Like Catherine Hall and other proponents of the ‘new’ imperial history, Lester showed that activists in the Cape and their metropolitan supporters and sponsors mutually shaped a discourse of
Madagascar: New Light from Old Sources’, in Didier Nativel and Faranirina V. Rajaonah (eds), Madagascar revisité: en voyage avec Françoise Raison-Jourde (Paris: Karthala, 2009 ), and Gwyn Campbell, David Griffith and the Missionary History of Madagascar (Leiden: Brill, 2012 ). On urban changes in the region, see Faranirina V. Rajaonah (ed.), Cultures citadines dans