Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920

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Hayden J A Bellenoit

Empires in Perspective

Focusing on late colonial India, Bellenoit analyses education in colonial society. Most scholars view missionary teachers as handmaidens of the empire, and their theology as intrinsically imperialistic. However, Bellenoit argues that their interaction with India led them away from imperial norms; a simplistic division of colonisers and colonised is insufficient to explain power relations in late colonial India.

Sample pages

• Missionary Education and Empire: Introduction
• Missionary Education and Empire: Index

Readership

Empire Studies, Religious Studies, Indian History, Victorian Studies

Contents

Introduction
Prologue: Knowledge, Religion and Education in Early Modern India
1 British Fears and Indian Society in the Emergence of Missionary Education, 1860–1920
2 Between East and West: Missionary Aims and Representations of India
3 The Failures of Education and its Infrastructural and Sociological Limits
4 Religious Interaction, the Curriculum and Indian Contestations
5 Maintaining Missionary Influence: Nationalism, Politics and the Raj, 1870–1920
Epilogue: Knowledge, Nationalism and Empire in late Colonial India

Reviews

'Essential...reading for anyone concerned with subcontinental religion and the missionary impulse in the post-Mutiny period, Bellenoit's project is formidably researched and closely argued.'
– Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, Ecclesiastical History

'this is an important contribution to South Asian social and educational history, to the history of the modern Protestant missionary movement, and to the wider debate over the relationships between religion, missions and empire.'
– Hugh Morrison, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies

'[Bellenoit] is particularly good on the day-to-day workings of educational bureaucracy, and his detailed analysis topples many broad stereotypes.'
– Jeffrey Cox, Victorian Studies

'Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, itself offers a thickly woven, immensely readable narrative, which is based on a refreshingly diligent use of archival sources from India and the UK.'
– Nandini Chatterjee, Biblio

Related titles

• Britain in India, 1765–1905
• Law and Imperialism: Criminality and Constitution in Colonial India and Victorian England
• Women Writing Home, 1700–1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire

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