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Book Review
| Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850. By Sujit Sivasundaram. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, and São Paulo: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xi + 244 pp. Includes illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $80.00.
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| This imperfectly realized but significant book takes a sympathetic look at the role of religion in the conversion of the residents of islands in the Pacific Ocean —ranging from Tahiti to Hawaii, and various other parts of the Polynesian archipelago. Sivasundaram examines the tactics used by the missionaries of the London Missionary Society in effecting those conversions. The gist of his argument is that is that those missionaries were men of science (we assume them to be men, anyway; little is said of the role of women in missionary families or of gender issues generally), and specifically, that they used this status to popularize and legitimize their missionary efforts back home by use of scientific diagrams, metaphors, and other forms of communication as a means of convincing secular and religious groups of the validity of their work. Along the way, their own identities were shaped by these appeals to, and use of, scientific argument and example. |
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Working primarily with sources drawn from the substantial collections of the Council for World Mission Archives at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, the author lays out a number of intriguing elements along the way, such as the missionaries' views of unconverted Pacific Islanders as akin to live natural history specimens, ripe for the naming and classification. He also provides a fascinating comparison of the visual record of the killing of the Rev. John Williams by natives of Erromango, in what is now the Republic of Vanuatu, in 1839. He draws comparisons with the earlier death of Captain Cook in Hawaii and analyzes the ways in which these representations were done to make the images consonant with evangelical views of nature and death. |
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The most important aspect of all of all this missionary zeal and attention —the natives who were subjected to proselytizing and conversion—might reasonably have been given an equal voice in the story, particularly during the periods when they moved from oral to written traditions in the early nineteenth century. However, we get relatively little of that voice. It would be a fascinating comparison, for example, to see how native populations felt about missionary appeals to the tangible; as Sivasundaram points out, one of the difficulties in converting native peoples and introducing (western) spirituality was the difficulty in convincing them that some tangible change was actually taking place. Apparently none of the abundant archives available in Hawaii, Tahiti, or elsewhere were used to access native writings, although he does include quotes from a series of incoming letters by natives held by the World Mission Archives in London. |
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The book also focuses almost entirely on British missionaries. The inclusion of the important and substantial roles played by American missionaries in the Pacific during the fifty-five year period under study would have made this a much stronger book, and a comparison of the American appropriation of nature as a persuasive tool and form of self-identification would have lent a considerably more international context to the book. |
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Daniel Lewis, a native of Hawaii, is the Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library. He is the author of Iron Horse Imperialism: The Southern Pacific of Mexico, 1880–1951 (Arizona, May 2007) and a forthcoming study of the struggles to professionalize the science of ornithology in the late nineteenth century. |
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