Overview
Beginning in 1701, missionary-minded Anglicans launched one of the earliest and most sustained efforts to Christianize the enslaved people of Britain's colonies. Hundreds of clergy traveled to widely-dispersed posts in North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) and undertook this work. Based on a belief in the essential unity of humankind, the Society's missionaries advocated for the conversion and better treatment of enslaved people. Yet, only a minority of enslaved people embraced Anglicanism, while a majority rejected it. Mastering Christianity closely explores these missionary encounters. The Society hoped to make slavery less cruel and more paternalistic but it came to stress the ideas that chattel slavery and Christianity were entirely compatible and could even be mutually beneficial. While important early figures saw slavery as troubling, over time the Society accommodated its message to slaveholders, advocated for laws that tightened colonial slave codes, and embraced slavery as a missionary tool. The SPG owned hundreds of enslaved people on its Codrington plantation in Barbados, where it hoped to simultaneously make profits and save souls. In Africa, the Society cooperated with English slave traders in establishing a mission at Cape Coast Castle, at the heart of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The SPG helped lay the foundation for black Protestantism but pessimism about the project grew internally and black people's frequent skepticism about Anglicanism was construed as evidence of the inherent inferiority of African people and their American descendants. Through its texts and practices, the SPG provided important intellectual, political, and moral support for slaveholding around the British empire. The rise of antislavery sentiment challenged the principles that had long underpinned missionary Anglicanism's program, however, and abolitionists viewed the SPG as a significant institutional opponent to their agenda. In this work, Travis Glasson provides a unique perspective on the development and entrenchment of a pro-slavery ideology by showing how English religious thinking furthered the development of slavery and supported the institution around the Atlantic world.
Full Product Details
Author: Travis Glasson (Assistant Professor of History, Assistant Professor of History, Temple University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 16.00cm
, Height: 2.80cm
, Length: 23.90cm
Weight: 0.567kg
ISBN: 9780199773961
ISBN 10: 0199773963
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 08 December 2011
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
<br> Over the years the tangled story of the changing relationship of the Anglican Church with the institution of slavery between the late seventeenth century and the eventual ending of that institution by the British in 1838 has received its fair share of scholarly attention. This ambitious study fully succeeds in its objective of casting the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, its activities and shifting perceptions of slavery and African peoples, in an entirely fresh light. It is scholarship of the very highest quality, of immense intellectual power and authority, and promises to stand as the definitive study for many years to come. --Betty Wood, Girton College, Cambridge <br><p><br> At last we have a history of the Anglican missions that appreciates the scale and impact of their religious enterprise. Mastering Christianity provides the best analysis yet of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a crucial instrument in the cultivation of a British At
Mastering Christianity examines why Anglican authorities came (belatedly) to the missionary impulse, how they sought to put this desire into practice, and why they proved so ineffectual, at least in regard to the conversion of the Africans who lived under British rule. This is a fascinating, if also somewhat depressing, study of an institution whose religious and moral principles, and potential for doing good, were fatally compromised by its social and political ties and ambitions. Robert Olwell, University of Texas at Austin, The American Historical Review
<br> Travis Glasson's marvelous new study of the SPG's operations among African slave populations in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Atlantic world is such a welcome addition to our understanding of the dynamics of imperial Christianity. Deeply researched and thoroughly engaging Glasson's thesis is an original and compelling one. --Brent S. Sirota, Journal of British Studies<br><p><br> Over the years the tangled story of the changing relationship of the Anglican Church with the institution of slavery between the late seventeenth century and the eventual ending of that institution by the British in 1838 has received its fair share of scholarly attention. This ambitious study fully succeeds in its objective of casting the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, its activities and shifting perceptions of slavery and African peoples, in an entirely fresh light. It is scholarship of the very highest quality, of immense intellectual power and authority, and promises to stand as the definitive study for many years to come. --Betty Wood, Girton College, Cambridge <br><p><br> At last we have a history of the Anglican missions that appreciates the scale and impact of their religious enterprise. Mastering Christianity provides the best analysis yet of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a crucial instrument in the cultivation of a British Atlantic world made possible by enslaved laborers. By closely examining the entanglement of Anglicanism and slavery, rather than skipping forward to the evangelical revivals, Glasson offers fresh insight into why so many black people joined the Church of England--and why most did not. --Vincent Brown, author of TheReaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery<br><p><br> Travis Glasson's pioneering and revisionist Mastering Christianity reconstructs the always vexed and increasingly corrosive relationship between the evangelical agenda of the Society for the Propagation of the
Author Information
Travis Glasson is Assistant Professor of History, Temple University.
