Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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most famous, made a contribution to imperial defence by serving in the

armed forces.

Members of the armed forces also sometimes participated in support-

ing the missionary movement. So, often willing to contribute to charitable

and humanitarian endeavours, RN personnel helped to start and to

support Christian missions such as the Loochoo Naval Mission at Naha,

the capital of the Ryukyu Islands, in the late 1840s and early 1850s and the

English Church Mission in Korea founded in 1889 by Bishop Charles

Corfe, long-time naval chaplain and friend of Queen Victoria’s sailor son,

the Duke of Edinburgh. Yet, naval personnel could also look with a some-

what jaundiced eye on missionaries. Philip Colomb, the naval strategist

and intellectual, noted in 1873 in his memoirs of slave catching in the

Indian Ocean that ‘very few naval men can clear themselves from that

general prejudice against missions and missionaries which is decidedly

current in the service, and which, rightly or wrongly founded, sways our

general opinion’.

Missionary work, however, was not restricted to non-

Christians. Few major ports in the Empire were without their Mission to

Seamen whose efforts were directed to help cater to the spirituals needs of

those in the merchant marine. Wherever there was an English-speaking

community, from the remote Bonin Islands to the rocky Labrador shore

and most places in between, a Christian priest could be found ready to

cater to the needs of locals and visitors. As this indicates, part of the mis-

sionary effort was channelled to help Britons overseas.

Whether it was to help Britons or to convert non-Christians to Chris-

tianity, it is patently evident, however, that the manifold activities of the

voluntary British missionary movement were supported by hundreds of

thousands of British people from every walk and station of life. Although

the major denominations in England and Scotland had virtually all

become involved in overseas missionary work during the nineteenth

century, if not earlier, the number of missionary societies remained barely

more than a handful until the last three decades of the century. During

that time, there was an exponential growth in missionary organizations

reﬂecting a wide array of different Christian theological and philan-

thropic interests as well as the energy of new groups such as the Student

Christian Movement and the Student Volunteer Missionary Union to

channel people and money into overseas missions. The presence of thou-

sands of missionaries in the towns and countryside throughout the Empire

undoubtedly had an inﬂuence on shaping British views of it. The enorm-

ous canon of literature and reports published in church magazines and

journals did constitute a major source of information about many parts of

the Empire. The missionary movement expanded as the onward mark of

British power generated the spread of British civilization. Its decline, as

the twentieth century progressed, can be taken as an early harbinger of

the declining national resources and ﬂagging energy underpinning

Britain’s overseas endeavours.

202 A.H. Ion

The realm of ideas, especially religious ones, is not easily transmitted

across cultural divides as other aspects of a culture, such as sports,

fashion, food and drink, which are less culturally challenging. Indeed,

sports and missionary work often joined together as in the case of C. T.

Studd, the famous cricketer and member of the Cambridge Seven who

joined the China Inland Mission in 1885, Walter Weston of the Church

Missionary Society who introduced mountaineering as a leisure sport

into Japan, and Eric Liddell, the Flying Scotsman and Olympic runner,

who served as a London Missionary Society missionary in China until his

premature death while a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second

World War. Spreading Western elementary school education and

improving local health conditions was seen in the pioneering work of

Mary Slessor in the Calabar region of Nigeria during the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries. At approximately the same time, Hannah

Riddell of the Church Missionary Society won lasting national fame in

Japan as one of the major pioneers of the care and treatment of lepers

in that country. As teachers in mission schools and kindergartens, as spe-

cialized social workers, as medical doctors and nurses or as evangelists in

rural or urban settings, single women came to be the backbone of the

overseas missionary movement although their male clerical counterparts

tended to receive most of the attention.

In the early twentieth century, Bishop Henry Montgomery, the Field

Marshal’s father and missionary statesman, divided the non-Christian

races into three classes in which:

there are the intellectual nations with or without sacred books; the

races more or less civilised which possess vitality, and are increasing in

number; and, lastly, those who are not necessarily lower in civilisation,

but who seem to be dying out.

The negative cultural implications of Christianity, for those parts of the

Empire with sophisticated traditional cultures (India is a prime example

and clearly in the ﬁrst case), have had an immense impact on political,

social and religious developments in them. The response of India to

Christianity (or its perceived threat to Indian culture) led to a profound

Indian effort to restore, rejuvenate or re-invent political, social and reli-

gious forms from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards.

Africa fell into Bishop Montgomery’s second case, and it was in different

parts of Africa that Montgomery felt two greatest tasks in Africa devolved

upon the two great Church of England missionary societies, Church Mis-

sionary Society (CMS) and the SPG. These tasks were: in the north, for the

CMS to ﬁght Islam in the only region that Islam was growing by building a

string of mission stations from the Niger to Khartoum in order to stop the

southern advance of Islam; in the south, the SPG had ‘to help the Church

in South Africa to make the Bantu races into a Christian force, and to

The empire that prays together stays together 203

prevent any of those racial struggles which are becoming so serious a

menace in the US’.

To Montgomery, the racial problem in the US was far

more serious than the Irish or the Boer or the Indian question in the British

Empire. He saw, however, that it was the SPG and the Anglican Church’s

role to ameliorate racial tensions in South Africa. It is not surprising, there-

fore, to ﬁnd either Trevor Huddleston, while serving as a priest in South

Africa in the 1950s being a leader in the anti-apartheid movement, or

Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Capetown who was greatly

inﬂuenced by Huddleston, playing such a large role in helping to amelio-

rate racial tensions in the late twentieth century South Africa. As Bishop of

Masasi during the early 1960s, Huddleston worked closely with Julius

Nyerere on the development of national independence for Tanzania.

Canon Max Warren, the long-time Secretary of the CMS, quoted Dennis

Osadebay, the founder of the Ibo State Union, as writing in 1947 that:

the missionary has made the African soil fertile for the growth of impe-

rialism ... (but) he has equally helped to lay the foundations for the

present spirit of nationalism... . When African historians come to write

their own account of the adventure of Africa with imperialism, they will

write of the missionaries as the greatest friends the Africans had.

The impact of the missionary movement, therefore, can be viewed as a

two-edged sword for both Britain as an imperial power and for the

indigenous nationalist. It is no wonder, then, the role of missionary move-

ment in the emergence of modern Africa can be controversial.

For Bishop Montgomery, in the early twentieth century, the third class

of non-Christians were those who belonged to races that supposedly were

dying out, and these were found in Melanesia, among the hill tribes of

India and the aborigines of Japan. The destruction of weaker cultures, like

those of the Canadian aboriginal First Nations or New Zealand Maoris,

remains a potent political issue to the present for governments and Chris-

tian Churches. The rapid success of Christian missionaries during the

1830s and 1840s in converting the majority of Maoris to Christianity has-

tened the decline of the traditional tribal society and contributed indi-

rectly to the Maori Wars of the mid-century. While the challenges to

missionary work might vary, as the nineteenth century progressed, a

common pattern of missionary work developed in order to combat the

problems of missionary work.

The inherent difﬁculties of direct evangelization and the mineﬁelds of

reciprocal misinterpretations and misunderstandings across cultural bound-

aries which could immediately confront the naïve preacher led the mission-

ary movement to put most effort into evangelistic work within a more

deﬁned environment. By the mid-nineteenth century, the missionary move-

ment had placed its emphasis on education and training which resulted

in the building of churches, schools, hospitals and other specialized

204 A.H. Ion

institutions like leprosia and garden homes for tuberculosis sufferers. As

civilization was equated in the nineteenth century with European civil-

ization, it also meant that missionaries also attempted to inculcate Western

manners and behaviour into potential converts. The opportunities of

obtaining a Western-style education in mission schools attracted many

Africans and Asians who might, otherwise, have chosen to have no contact

with missionaries. The inﬂuence of Christian social thought has been

evident in the political ideas of post-independence African leaders such as

Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania who received

their early education in mission schools,

but as the case of the Chinese

statesman, Zhou Enlai, revealed, attending a mission school does not

necessarily lead to a Christian result. Moreover, mission school education,

because it increased awareness of rights of people in the outside world,

could also serve as the breeding ground for those who might later argue

for political change or even independence. Kwame Nkrumah, the ﬁrst

President of Ghana, received his early education at a Roman Catholic

school and later taught there. He drew support for the independence of

Ghana from ex-servicemen, journalists, elementary school teachers and lit-

erate people who had some primary school education, that is, people who

had often had a similar early exposure to Christian education. During the

late nineteenth century, for those who lived by the shores of Lake Nyasa on

the Calabar coast or in the hills of the Santal Parganas, the mission school

offered the only place where a Western-style education could be obtained.

Teaching provided missionaries (both male and female) with familiar

work conducted in a controlled atmosphere. An important pioneer

endeavour, which served as a model that others quickly emulated, was

made by Alexander Duff, a Church of Scotland missionary, who estab-

lished in Calcutta in the 1830s a higher education institution in which

English was the language of instruction with the aim of not only produc-

ing an educated Christian population but also of bringing the Christian

Gospel to the Indian intellectual elite who could hardly be reached any

other way.

The missionary educational effort was not solely directed

towards the elite, for it also aimed to encourage literacy among ordinary

people so that they could read the Christian literature, which the British

and Foreign Bible Society helped to make available in a multitude of dif-

ferent languages. Other organizations looked to helping the poor and

deprived throughout the Empire and beyond; the social work of the Salva-

tion Army was extended from the slums of the East End of London to

those of the East End of Tokyo with few slums left untouched along the

imperial trade routes in-between. This modernizing strategy on the part of

missions was rooted in the belief that Western culture was superior to all

others and that European economic, social, and political organizations

should be taken as standards of civilization.

Some doubt, albeit largely ﬂeeting, was cast outside of the missionary

world, however, about the assumption that subject races had the potential

The empire that prays together stays together 205

to achieve civilization by the grisly events of the Indian Mutiny and the

1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica. By the late nineteenth century, the

spread of Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionary thought was providing

non-Christian religionists, already primed with traditional religious argu-

ments against Christianity, with new ammunition from Western sources to

criticize Christianity and the widely espoused view of Christians and mis-

sionaries that it was the essence of Western civilization. Further, growing

awareness of and the systematic study of other great religions such as Bud-

dhism, Hinduism and Islam, which was often stimulated by missionaries’

own efforts to try to understand the nature of the opposition of those reli-

gions to Christianity, contributed to sow doubt in the minds of some

Christians about the innate superiority of Christianity over other religions

and the necessity to convert non-Christians to it. At the turn of the

century, Lord George Curzon, the Viceroy of India, was one of those who

bitterly opposed those who thought that the only hope for Indians lay in

their conversion to Christianity and transformation into brown English-

men. Curzon felt that Indians should adhere to their own religions and ‘to

preserve what he called the “idiosyncrasies of native thought and custom”,

while encouraging Indians to assimilate Western ideas into their own

culture’.

Christianity, however, was the religion of the British and,

despite the reservations of those like Curzon, as such was present wher-

ever the Union ﬂag ﬂew. A major blow to Christian prestige was self-

inﬂicted by the slaughter between civilized Christian nations during the

First World War, which naturally served to weaken the appeal of Christian-

ity as the religion of Western civilization for non-Christians.

Missionaries accepted the general idea of the British Empire as a provi-

dential force for good, although many were prepared to take issue with

imperial authorities when larger humanitarianism interests were compro-

mised. This was especially true in the West Indies, West and South Africa

and the Paciﬁc Islands where missionaries sought to protect and enhance

native rights against planter, settler and trader interests in the years after

the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. Once the abolition

of slavery had been achieved, Christian ﬁgures like Thomas Fowel Buxton

actively campaigned for a government-sponsored humanitarian develop-

ment expedition to the Niger River (which ultimately came to grief in

1842) that was aimed at regenerating West Africa, after its long devasta-

tion by the slave trade, through the development of a legitimate com-

merce in cotton and other agricultural products by independent Africans.

The humanitarian efforts and inﬂuence of evangelical missionaries in

India can also be seen in the reform campaigns to bring about an end to

sati (the ritual self-immolation by widows) and female infanticide.

Any such challenges were not taken into account when David

Livingstone, the famous Scottish missionary-explorer of Africa, addressed

a missionary meeting in the Senate House in Cambridge in December

1857. While Livingstone’s appeal led directly to the establishment of the

206 A.H. Ion

Universities Mission to Central Africa the next year, this meeting also

proved to be a turning point in the British public image of the missionary

and the overseas missionary endeavour from Britain, for it led to large

numbers of Oxbridge graduates being attracted to overseas missionary

work not only to Africa but also to all other parts of the world. The result

was the stock of missionary dramatically rose as the late nineteenth

century advanced. The death of Bishop Charles Frederick Mackenzie from

malaria while journeying on the Ruo River in 1862, the murder of Bishop

John Coleridge Patterson by Nukapu islanders of the Santa Cruz group in

1871 as well as Livingstone’s own death in 1873 provided mid-Victorians

with missionary heroes who sacriﬁced their lives for their Christian beliefs.

Livingstone was a complex and ﬂawed ﬁgure whose legacy both as a mis-

sionary and as an explorer is controversial. He was ﬁred by a belief that

opening up Africa to the twin beneﬁts of legitimate commerce and Chris-

tianity was the most effective solution to the African slave trade and the

key to the continent’s material development.

Among the critics of this view was Philip Colomb of the RN. Colomb

saw that the packaging of Christianity and civilization had led to the disas-

ters of the early years of the Universities Mission to Central Africa.

According to Colomb, the calamities that attended this mission’s early

efforts in central Africa also stemmed from the poor planning and

muddled thinking of missionaries and their enthusiastic supporters at

home in trying to establish a mission hundreds of miles from their supply

base on the coast; by missionaries taking sides in the tribal warfare that

surrounded them and because of the devastating effects of drought on

that part of central Africa into which the missionaries ventured. In

Colomb’s view, the slave trade and Arab slave traders were responsible for

very few of the problems that missionaries had to confront. Further, even

if missionaries were successful in bringing about the end of the slave

trade in central Africa, they needed to supply the freed slaves with the

means to earn a living which freedom alone could not provide. Colomb

felt that a civil mission could be launched into African territory with the

object of instituting settled government, just laws and the spread of prac-

tical knowledge among the indigenous population, but he also felt that

such a mission might have to maintain itself by force of arms. He saw that

Rajah Brooke’s settlement of Sarawak as a successful example of this; in

part, because Brooke did not sacriﬁce any part of his theory of govern-

ment when he was compelled to use warlike measure to preserve order.

Clearly, such a civil mission was primarily civilizing and secondarily reli-

gious, with its lay governor supreme and the missionary subordinate.

Colomb had never heard of a purely religious civil mission, such as had

been ﬁrst proposed for the Universities Mission to Central Africa, ever

being successful ‘except perhaps in China, missions to barbarous

independent tribes become almost inevitably politico-religious, with the

evil results hinted at’.

The empire that prays together stays together 207

As well as commerce, civilization and Christianity, missionaries in some

cases saw that imperialism could bring protection. It could supply the

stability and law and order under which missions might better thrive. In

1875, Fiji became a Crown Colony at the urging of Wesleyan Methodist

Missionary Society missionaries; in 1884, southern Bechuanaland became

a protectorate at the urging of London Missionary Society missionaries; in

1889, Scottish missionaries belonging to the Free Church and Church of

Scotland supported the formation of a protectorate over Nyasaland; and

in 1894, Church Missionary Society missionaries and their supporters were

instrumental in the declaration of a full protectorate over Uganda. This

process was fulﬁlling what Colomb had earlier perceived that the prospect

of missions ﬂourishing improved when the responsibility for law and

order was taken out of their hands and the missionary subordinate to the

lay governor.

In Nyasaland, the beginning of the series of separate expeditions and

campaigns that collectively form the so-called Slavers’ War between 1888

and 1896 caused by the clash of interest between the African Lakes

Company (whose originally shareholders were almost entirely supporters of

Scottish missions in Central Africa) and missionaries in Livingstonia Mission

and Yao tribe slaveraiding chiefs as Company and missionaries’ chiefs

pushed their inﬂuence north of Lake Nyasa towards Lake Tanganyika. The

security situation in Nyasaland led directly to the raising of the indigenous

tribesmen of Nyasaland as ﬁghting troops leading to the formation of the

Central African Riﬂes (the predecessor of the famous King’s African Riﬂes).

Among the ﬁrst troops raised were Atonga from the shores of Lake Nyasa.

This tribe had been long victimized by slavers and was coming under the

inﬂuence of the Livingstonia Mission. With the end of slavery and active

paciﬁcation efforts by the Central Africa Riﬂes, the Livingstonia Mission

enjoyed very considerable growth in number of converts through the 1890s.

Yet, resentment there was against the actions of the British that came to the

fore in Nyasaland with a bloody rising in 1915 led by John Chilembwe, an

African Baptist minister and advocate of a Christianity independent of mis-

sionaries, who protested at working conditions at the coffee plantation close

to his mission station and at the loss of life among African troops in the First

World War.

If the growth of Christianity in Nyasaland came with the establishment

of a British protectorate, which brought the Army and peace, religious

turmoil in Uganda also contributed to the establishment of a British pro-

tectorate there. The situation in Uganda was complicated not only by the

clash between Muslim and Christian interests but also by a division among

Christian missionaries between the British Protestant CMS representing

the evangelical wing of Church of England and the French Roman

Catholic White Fathers (Père Blancs) who believed that to be civilized was

to be French and Catholic. Religious rivalry of this sort was not unknown

elsewhere; Keith Sinclair has noted in the case of New Zealand in the

208 A.H. Ion

mid-nineteenth century that the bitter recrimination between Wesleyan

Methodist and CMS missionaries helped to vitiate Christian efforts to safe-

guard Maori interests.

Yet, it was not only the two Protestant denomina-

tions who were vying to convert the Maori for the Roman Catholic

missionaries were also at work in New Zealand, and apparently the Maoris

‘greatly enjoyed’ the triangular theological controversy that arose between

the three Christian groups.

In Uganda, the playing off of missionary

groups against each other was largely brought to an end when Sudanese

and local troops raised by Frederick Lugard, who had previously been

engaged in trying to stamp out the slave trade in Nyasaland before moving

north to Buganda at the end of 1890, were used by the Imperial British

East Africa Company to secure British interests and with it the Protestants

became the dominant religious faction. Yet, as Max Warren pointed out in

1967, ‘the Church-State settlement imposed by Captain Lugard in Buganda

in 1891 has remained for over seventy years a cause of unease’.

Despite

the future religious problems that his actions might cause, Lugard con-

tinued on to further imperial adventures in Nigeria and West Africa includ-

ing helping to form the locally raised Riﬂes for service against the Ashanti

and to maintain the peace in Nigeria where Muslim and Christian spheres

met. These units were the predecessors of those West African forces that

distinguished themselves in the ﬁghting in Burma during the Second

World War. In 1959, A. P. Thornton writing about the debate over the

expansion of empire in the 1880s pointed out that

many of those who objected vehemently to spirited policies of over-

seas expansion were strong humanitarians, and how humanitarianism

or Christianity itself – both of them nothing if not spirited policies –

could be exported to savage lands save in military baggage-cars, and

maintained there safely save by imperial garrisons, was as yet far from

plain.

While Nyasaland and Uganda are both places where the Army brought

peace, Christianity in the Empire (at least before the First World War)

also beneﬁted from its identiﬁcation of missionaries and British colonial

power. However, it was not military power or even peace that was

required for missionaries to proselytize non-Christians successfully but

rather, as was shown in the case of Korea, the identiﬁcation between

Christianity and nationalism in which the protection of culture and lan-

guage loomed large.

There were occasions when Christianity and, more usually, other religions

became signiﬁcant factors in overall strategic considerations of imperial

defence.

The empire that prays together stays together 209

Indeed, nowhere was the religious issue more evident in the British

Empire than in India whose religions were almost as varied and numerous

as its languages. Although the majority of Indians were either Hindus or

Muslims, there were signiﬁcant numbers of Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs and

Jains. In 1892, Sir Charles Dilke and Spenser Wilkinson pointed out that

the supremacy of the English rests only to a limited extent upon their

own superior force. It is made possible by the divisions among the

natives. To a great extent our ascendancy is ‘moral’, resting, that is,

upon character and self-conﬁdence. To this conﬁdence the natives

bow. It has produced in them a corresponding belief in the omnipo-

tence of Great Britain.

Yet, it was also fortunate for the British that there were numbers of

Indians who saw soldiering as an honourable profession and were pre-

pared to join the colours. Prior to 1914, the majority of recruits for the

Indian Army were drawn from the so-called ﬁghting classes, which

included Dogras, Garhwalis, Jats, Kumanonis, Madrasis, Mahrattas, Hin-

dustani Muslims, Punjabi Muslims, Rajputana Muslims, Pathans, Rajputs

and Sikhs. North India was a particularly strong recruiting area with Sikhs

contributing very large numbers to both the cavalry and infantry and

Gurkhas (Hindus, recruited outside of India in Nepal) also providing

large numbers. However, it was Muslims recruited both in the south and

the north of India as well as from tribes beyond the Northwest Frontier

who provided the largest proportion to both cavalry and infantry.

1919, widespread demonstrations in the Punjab, even before the dis-

graceful atrocity of the Amritsar Massacre, were the cause of particular

worry to the British authorities because the Punjab provided a dispropor-

tionately large number of troops both Sikhs and Muslims for the Indian

Army.

Yet, despite the fact that Britain went to war against a Muslim

Ottoman Empire, Muslim troops in African and Indian units remained

loyal to the British cause. The pool of Indian manpower that the British

could draw on was relatively limited; as late as 1937, D. H. Cole held that

the ﬁghting classes in India amounted to no more than 40 million people

and that 60 per cent of combatant troops in the Indian Army came from

the Punjab, while Bengal with a population greater than that of Britain

only provided some 7,000 troops out of a total of 683,000 Indian troops.

Affection and loyalty to the British in terms of joining the armed forces in

wartime had, at least, in terms of the expansion of the Indian Army

during the Second World War much to do with the desire for regular pay

and membership in an honourable profession rather than hatred of a

distant enemy.

However, the British rulers in India can be seen to be

exploiting a relative small group of warrior classes largely drawn from

religious minorities to help them maintain military control over the reli-

gious majority. Nevertheless, this military exploitation is softened by a

210 A.H. Ion

romantic gloss that permeated much of the British encounter with the

warring classes in India and which was nowhere more pronounced than

on the Northwest Frontier. A gloss, however blush-rose it was, that can

safely be said to be largely one-sided.

From Alexander the Great to Field Marshal Alexander of Tunis and a

great scroll of names in between them, military and also political careers

were made or unmade on the Northwest Frontier. Akbar S. Ahmed has

pointed out that the colonial encounter there was reduced to the nature

of a cricket match in which both sides – the British and the Pathan –

played by a sportsmanlike set of rules and stressed that

above all, the Frontier represented a male world and its masculine

symbols a system that translated easily into classic public school life ...

absence of the ‘Mem-Sahib’ that gave life on the Frontier its special

public-schoolboy ﬂavour, and their presence in large numbers after

the opening of the Suez Canal late last century has been considered as

the ﬁnal ethnic and social barrier between Indians and the British.

This same male world of public school adventure was not restricted to

Northwest Frontier and its Scouts but can be found in campaigns against

the Mad Mullah in Somaliland during the ﬁrst quarter of the twentieth

century.

In this, the Indian Army played a part. The King’s African Riﬂes

(formed by the amalgamation of the Central African and Ugandan Riﬂes)

drew many of its early British ofﬁcers, like William Manning, its ﬁrst

Inspector General and later a distinguished colonial governor in Africa

and Ceylon, from the Indian Army as well as many of its NCOs. Under

Manning, the askaris were used in punitive expeditions often against large

numbers of skilful tribesmen in remote and unmapped regions. The

troops themselves were

drawn from the same tribes, armed with out-of-date riﬂes, possessed of

marksmanship probably little superior to that of the men they fought

and led only by a handful of British ofﬁcers, these disciplined askaris

controlled many thousands of their own kind as the effective instru-

ment of British power.

In his fascinating autobiography, Hugh Boustead, who served in the

Camel Corps in the Sudan during the interwar years, wrote that

the family atmosphere of the company, the manliness and intense

sense of fun of the Sudanese soldier and his complete reliance on his

ofﬁcer produced a feeling of affection between the British company

commander and his men which formed one of the main charms of

African service with an irregular corps.

The empire that prays together stays together 211