Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840-1900 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series)

Through their copious published writings, missionaries conveyed their experiences and anxieties about people and cultures they encountered in a much-consumed strand of colonial discourse, that allowed the British public to imagine the remote countries they inhabited. Using research that draws on these writings from missionaries in southern Africa and India, Missionary Discourses of Difference is organised into three important themes of imperial and postcolonial scholarship and major missionary concern: family, sickness and violence. Each thematic section considers both how missionaries represented race, religion, gender and culture and how their thinking was shaped by anxieties about their own experiences. This two-pronged approach allows for a sustained interrogation of the interplay between self and other in missionary writing and probes the limits of inclusion beneath the missionary commitment to universalism.