British Empire

The great British missionary societies were founded within a generation of each other at the end of the eighteenth century, the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, the London Missionary Society in 1795, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, alongside the older Anglican societies of 1698 and 1701. They were voluntary bodies raising money from congregations, not organs of government, and Andrew Porter's study is largely an argument against the assumption that they were simply the empire's chaplaincy.

The East India Company, which governed most of India until 1858, refused for decades to admit missionaries at all, on the plain commercial reasoning that interfering with Indian religion would cost it trade and peace. Missionaries were only permitted after evangelical campaigners forced a clause into the Company's charter renewal of 1813. Where missionaries did operate they frequently quarrelled with settlers, planters and officials, and in some colonies were regarded as agitators.

The clearest case of religion moving the empire rather than following it is abolition. The campaign that ended the British slave trade in 1807 and slavery in the empire in 1833 was organised largely by evangelicals and Quakers, argued in explicitly religious terms, and carried against powerful commercial interests. Its success became a lasting part of how the empire justified itself afterwards, including in the acquisition of new territory.

After the revolt of 1857, which was set off partly by a rumour about the grease on new cartridges, the Crown took India from the Company and Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 promised that no one would be favoured or molested on account of religious faith. The policy that followed was non-interference in worship combined with deep interference in classification. Personal law was codified by religious community, so that marriage, inheritance and adoption were administered under separate Hindu, Muslim, Parsi and Christian codes; the decennial census required every subject to belong to one religion and one caste; and Orientalist scholarship, working with Brahmin informants and Pali texts, gave the terms Hinduism and Buddhism the shape they now have worldwide.

The record includes coercion. In Canada, church-run residential schools operated under government contract from the nineteenth century, removing Indigenous children from their families and suppressing their languages and ceremonies, a system whose harms the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented in 2015. Comparable school systems and bans on ceremony operated elsewhere in the settler empire.

The empire also produced religions its rulers never intended. Rastafari arose in British Jamaica in the 1930s around the coronation of Haile Selassie, and independent African churches multiplied across the mission field. What survives institutionally is the Anglican Communion, whose membership is now overwhelmingly outside Britain.