'Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia' offers a series of analyses that highlights the complexities of British and Indian civilizing missions in original ways and through various historiographical approaches. The book applies the concept of the civilizing mission to a number of issues in the colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia: economic development, state-building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.
The contributions in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century discuss how top-down interventions to “improve” societies were justified in terms such as nation building, social engineering, humanitarianism, modernization or the spread of democracy.
By comparing the role and influence of early Christian missionaries with those of Christian NGOs today, this book critically assesses the idea of a Christian 'civilizing mission' within the context of China. It provides a local, non-Han perspective based on a rich array of historical, ethnographical, and empirical sources.
This book investigates the role of cultural heritage as a constitutive dimension of different civilizing missions from the colonial era to the present. It includes case studies of the Habsburg Empire and German colonialism in Africa, Asian case studies of (post)colonial India and the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, China and French Indochina, and a special discussion on 20th-century Cambodia and the temples of Angkor. The themes examined range from architectural and intellectual history to historic preservation and restoration. Taken together, they offer an overview of historical processes spanning two centuries of institutional practices, wherein the concept of cultural heritage was appropriated both by political regimes and for UNESCO World Heritage agendas.
Our Civilizing Mission is both an exploration of colonial education and a response to current anxieties about the foundations of the 'humanities'. Focusing on the example of Algeria, it asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education.
Inherent in colonialism was the idea of self-legitimation, the most powerful tool of which was the colonizer's claim to bring the fruits of progress and modernity to the subject people. In colonial logic, people who were different because they were inferior had to be made similar - and hence equal - by civilizing them. However, once this equality had been attained, the very basis for colonial rule would vanish. Colonialism as Civilizing Mission explores British colonial ideology at work in South Asia. Ranging from studies on sport and national education, to pulp fiction to infanticide, to psychiatric therapy and religion, these essays on the various forms, expressions and consequences of the British 'civilizing mission' in South Asia shed light on a topic that even today continues to be an important factor in South Asian politics.
In recent years much scholarly attention has been focused on the encounter of cultures during the early modern period, and the global implications that such encounters held. As a result of this work, scholars have now begun to re-evaluate many aspects of early culture contact, not least with respect to Christian missionary activities. Prominent amongst the missionaries were members of the Society of Jesus. Emerging as a dynamic new religious order in the wake of the Reformation, the Jesuits were deeply committed to promoting religious and cultural reforms both within Europe and in non-Christian lands. Yet whilst scholars have revealed much about the Jesuits' innovative educational endeavours, and their numerous missions to the Americas, Asia and the Sub-Continent, less attention has been paid to the nature of the Jesuits' global civilizing mission as a key feature of their institutional character. Nor has sufficient work been done to fully explain the relationship between the Jesuits' efforts to evangelize and civilize those areas within the Catholic fold and those without. Taking as its focus the city of Naples, this study illuminates how the Jesuits' work in a Catholic European setting reflected their broader global civilizing mission. Despite its Catholic heritage, Naples was popularly perceived as a place of spiritual and social disorder, thus providing an irresistible challenge to religious reformers, such as the Jesuits, who sought to 'civilize' the city. Drawing in considerable numbers of the order, Naples proved to be a training ground for the Jesuits that shaped the order's missionary praxis and influenced the thinking of many who would later travel further afield. By gaining a fuller understanding of this process, it is possible to better understand what drove the Jesuits to craft and perpetuate a cultural map that continues to resonate down to our own times. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series 'Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu'.
This volume concerns the missionary philanthropic movement which burst onto the social scene in early nineteenth century in England, becoming a popular provincial movement which sought no less than national and global reformation.
This book provides an historical, critical analysis of the doctrine of 'civilising mission' in Portuguese colonialism in the crucial period from 1870 to 1930. Exploring international contexts and transnational connections, this 'civilising mission' is analysed and assessed by examining the employment and distribution of African manpower.
This is the first comprehensive treatment of the reasons why international organizations have engaged in territorial administration. The book describes the role of international territorial administration and analyses the various purposes associated with this activity, revealing the objectives which territorial administration seeks to achieve.
