Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World
Autor Travis Glassonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 14 sep 2017
Remarcăm în Mastering Christianity o analiză riguroasă a modului în care anglicanismul misionar s-a intersectat cu instituția sclaviei în lumea atlantică, începând cu fondarea Societății pentru Propagarea Evangheliei în Părți Străine (SPG) în 1701. Ediția de față detaliază tranziția ideologică a clerului anglican: dacă inițial existau rezerve morale față de sclavie, ulterior instituția a fost îmbrățișată ca un instrument misionar, culminând cu situații paradoxale în care Biserica deținea propriile plantații de sclavi, precum cea de la Codrington, Barbados. Putem afirma că lucrarea demonstrează cum necesitatea de a acomoda mesajul religios în fața proprietarilor de sclavi a dus la o rigidizare a codurilor coloniale și la justificarea morală a sclaviei prin intermediul textelor teologice. Comparabil cu Anglicanism, Missions and Empire de Rowan Strong în rigurozitatea cu care urmărește expansiunea instituțională, volumul de față se distinge prin focalizarea pe contradicțiile etice și pe modul în care eșecul conversiunilor a alimentat prejudecățile rasiale. În contextul operei sale, Travis Glasson continuă explorarea grupurilor marginalizate sau a perspectivelor istorice mai puțin convenționale, temă regăsită și în Nobody Men, unde analizează experiențele coloniștilor neutri din timpul Revoluției Americane. Mastering Christianity oferă astfel o perspectivă critică asupra rădăcinilor protestantismului de culoare și a rezistenței intelectuale în fața aboliționismului.
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Livrare economică 29 mai-09 iunie
Specificații
ISBN-10: 0190683015
Pagini: 330
Ilustrații: 15 halftones
Dimensiuni: 157 x 231 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States
De ce să citești această carte
Această lucrare este esențială pentru cercetătorii istoriei religioase și coloniale, oferind o explicație documentată despre modul în care religia a fost utilizată pentru a justifica sclavia. Cititorul va înțelege mecanismele prin care o instituție misionară a devenit un pilon de susținere pentru exploatarea umană, dar și originile complexe ale identității religioase afro-americane. Este un studiu de caz fascinant despre adaptarea doctrinei la interese economice și politice.
Despre autor
Travis Glasson este un istoric specializat în istoria religioasă și socială a lumii atlantice, cu un interes deosebit pentru perioada modernă timpurie. Prin lucrările sale, acesta explorează intersecțiile dintre religie, rasă și politică în imperiul britanic. Pe lângă volumul de față, Glasson a publicat Nobody Men, o analiză a neutralității în timpul Revoluției Americane, demonstrând o capacitate remarcabilă de a aduce la lumină perspective istorice subreprezentate. Cercetările sale se bazează pe arhive extinse, oferind o viziune nuanțată asupra structurilor de putere coloniale.
Descriere
Recenzii
This important book by Travis Glasson extends and deepens our understanding of the earliest English Protestant missionary society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. ... To read Glasson's book is to glimpse an age when Anglicans sought to forge a new, expansive imperial identity, but also struggled to square their commitment to maintaining social order with supporting the radical Christian notion of the equality of souls. ... Mastering Christianity represents an important addition to our knowledge of the spread of multiple, competitive forms of Christianity in the developing British imperial framework. With a sure command of the historiography and sources, Glasson's careful scholarship has produced the first full history of one of the most important institutional forces in the British Empire in the eighteenth century in its relationship to slavery.
Mastering Christianity is a welcome addition to the burgeoning historical literature on slavery and the Atlantic world. ... [It] provides a rich if sobering introduction to how a Christian organization dedicated to the salvation of 'heathen' servants became a servant to the status quo, supporting slavery and its perpetual extension. ... His book provides a compelling explanation for that wavering trajectory.
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.
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.
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
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 Gospel in Foreign Parts and the reality of its economic and ideological involvement with black chattel slavery. Mastering Christianity is a significant contribution to studies of race, religion, slavery, and abolition in the British circum-Atlantic empire.
Travis Glasson has written the definitive history of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel's evangelization mission to enslaved Africans and their descendants in the British Atlantic World. Brilliantly conceived and exhaustively researched, Mastering Christianity explores the intellectual and practical evolutions of the SPG mission from the dawn of the eighteenth century to the abolition of British West Indian slavery in 1838. Glasson's readable prose yields fresh insights about the work of Anglican missionaries, the people they sought to convert, and the impact these missions had upon the struggles over Atlantic slavery's future.
Mastering Christianity is an important reconsideration of the intersection of religion, race and slavery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Like few others, Glasson takes us inside the complex world of missions to enslaved people and of Christianity's complicity in slavery and racial hierarchies.
We can be very grateful to Travis Glasson for showing us what can happen when we turn our voices from the service of our Lord to the service of our own corps and ourselves.
Glasson's excellent new book repositions the eighteenth-century Church of England as a critical imperial institution with an Atlantic reach…[and] its struggles to engage and convert enslaved and native people while also sustaining its relationship with the Atlantic planter class."-Rebecca A. Goetz, Journal of Religion
“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, American Historical Review
Mastering Christianity presents a deeply informative account of contemporary beliefs and activities; it is both rigorously researched and clearly (and dispassionately) argued. Broadly speaking, it adds perspective to how Anglicanism has struggled to adapt to historical change, and one suspects that the stalwarts of the SPG would be surprised by the Church's modern demographics.
In this richly detailed study the author sets out to revise the conventional wisdom about Anglican humanitarianism...and to explain Anglicanism's failure to draw into its fold the black peoples who were the focus of its missionary efforts....The book succeeds....Highly useful and is likely to stand as the definitive work on the subject for years to come.
An important contribution to the literature on the intersection of race and religion in the Atlantic world.
The book's strength is in engaging with the questions of SPG intellectual contributions to growing racial awareness, and in recognizing and giving a place to the agency of non-Europeans who both resisted and adopted missionary Anglicanism in the eighteenth century....An unquestionably important intervention into the literature on missionary humanitarianism and the missionary relationship with slavery and abolition.
Glasson's excellent study reveals how devout men came to put profits and the perspective of slave masters ahead of concern for the souls and the bodies of the enslaved people it might have helped.