History of the London Missionary Society

SUMMARY
This essay discusses relations of Papuans with foreign incomers from first known contact up to 1884, when a British Protectorate was proclaimed over south-east New Guinea. The area covered is that of the future Protectorate together with Torres Strait, both initially part of a single cultural continuum. A variety of significant personalities, Papuan and foreign, are portrayed.
The scene is set by a characterisation of Papuan society as viewed by white men in the later nineteenth century, particularly of aspects that coloured relationships between Papuans and foreigners. Early explorers and their contacts with Papuans are next discussed, starting with Torres in 1606, followed by Cook, Bligh of the Bounty, Flinders and others, and then by the 1840s surveying voyages of HM ships Fly, Bramble and Rattlesnake, with the unique story of Barbara Thompson, discovered by the Rattlesnake after living marooned for some years among the Kaurareg people of Torres Straits.
A new phase begins in the 1860s with the development of the Torres Strait bêche-de-mer and pearl-shell fisheries, and the subsequent arrival of the London Missionary Society, each contributing to the transformation of Torres Strait societies. From 1873-4 interest expands to the mainland and islands of south-east New Guinea, including missionary and trading activity, the Papuan response, periodic naval intervention, the 1878 Port Moresby gold-rush, and especially the labour trade interlude of 1884, with the atrocities of the Hopeful.
A separate chapter narrates the build-up of British and Australian interest in New Guinea, culminating in 1884 with the proclamation of the Protectorate. This is followed by an analysis of ensuing murders which cast light on the interplay of Papuans and foreigners. The essay concludes with remarks on the many-sided question of how “civilisation” confronted “savagery” in Papua - a recurrent theme of contemporary observers.

Short article exploring a ship's bell from the S.S. John Williams (1894-1930), preserved at the headquarters of the London Missionary Society, and now at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Published in 'Trophies, Relics and Curios?' edited by Wingfield and Jacobs (2015) Sidestone Press, Leiden.

Teasing out the ‘making and remaking of relationships’ (Strathern 1993:91) that occurred during transactions between Papuan communities and representatives of the London Missionary Society, in this chapter I explore the intentions, histories and experiences materialized in the collections of the Reverends
James Chalmers and John H. Holmes. These men’s collections form the bulk of the LMS’s Papuan objects in the British Museum, and
collectively span forty-two years of their experiences in Papua (1877–1919). To complicate our understanding of these
collections, I bring the actions of Pacific Island teachers, specifically those of Rarotongans, into view. Doing so reveals how Pacific Islanders played a critical, but unacknowledged role, in
the movement of objects into museums, and points to the historical entanglement of Polynesia and Melanesia in the making of contemporary Oceania (Thomas 1989). Finally, I reflect on how material embodiments of these histories continue to shape sociality in PNG.

Nineteenth-century missionaries to southern Africa sought materially to remake and reshape the peoples and places they encountered according to notions of virtuous living, correct behaviour and Christian morality. This article explores attitudes to landscape and place in a short-lived London Missionary Society mission in the Khwebe Hills of Ngamiland, Botswana, which was occupied between 1893 and 1896. Combining archaeological evidence with archival records, the article will examine the factors that shaped Alfred Wookey’s approach to this new landscape, and how he tried to create a utopian settlement in the Khwebe Hills, far from the corrupting dangers of the Batawana town, or the threat to health of Lake Ngami. The failure of the mission after just three years can be seen as a result of this isolation, both in terms of the struggle for survival and as a political strategy by the Batawana Kgosi Sekgoma Letsholathebe to ostracise the mission politically.

Keywords: mission archaeology, landscape, London Missionary Society, Botswana, Khwebe hills, domestic space

This article seeks to trace the fussy boundaries of religion and the public space in the modern colonial archive of southern Africa. It investigates how drawing such boundaries became a central strategy in translating indigenous cultures into sin and creating guilt in communities that did not observe the sacred and secular boundaries. The article uses the attestations of the 19 th century letters to Mahoko a Becwana, a London Missionary Society public paper, printed from Kuruman. While the Batswana worldview kneaded religion and all spheres of individual and collective public space, modern western colonial perspectives claimed otherwise. This paper analyses the letters for the intrusion of colonial religion into the public space of Batswana; the colonial agenda to translate key cultural beliefs and activities into the realm of evil and the various responses it initiated – thereby uncovering that perhaps the separation of religion from state has always been a mythological and ideological construction. When we attempted to convince them of their state as sinners, they would boldly affirm … that there was not a sinner in the tribe (Robert Moffat 18:42:254).

Who are Charles (Karl) and Anne Steinkopff (Steinkopf)? What are the Steinkopff stepping stones to Australia? Are there any? What is the significance of this London couple for the history of the Lutheran tradition in Australia?  My purpose is to try to answer these questions. Far from being ‘stoneheads’, Charles and Anne Steinkopff provided a stable place and hospitality to many people from St. Mary's German  Lutheran Church, Savoy.  This included people in London but also missionaries who passed through London, to various parts of the British Empire and elsewhere.  Both had soft hearts in their city context. They were, unwittingly, theologians of the crucified one, as they participated in the sufferings of the city corpus, of other peoples,  and perhaps bore their own,  in that they had no children. This is Part One.  The published version has endnotes instead of footnotes, which appear here.

""This article presents the person and work of an eminent forgotten
figure of the revival, a pioneer of missions and of theological
education : David Bogue (1750-1825). While relating his long career
as pastor and director of the “Missionary Bible Institute” in Gosport,
the author also discusses the question as to whether the Baptist William Carey (1761-1834) or the Presbyterian David Bogue should be considered “the father of modern missions”. Finally, the article draws the reader’s attention to a particular point of Bogue’s educational system : the tutorial system.

Cet article porte sur la personne et l’oeuvre d’une éminente figure oubliée de l’histoire du Réveil, de la mission, mais aussi de la formation théologique : le pasteur écossais David Bogue (1750-1825).
Nous considérerons surtout sa longue carrière de pasteur et directeur
« d’Institut biblique missionnaire » à Gosport. En établissant quelles
ont été les relations entre Bogue et la mission baptiste de William
Carey (1761-1834), nous chercherons à déterminer qui, de Carey ou
de Bogue, doit être désigné comme « le père des missions modernes », et montrerons une des spécificités pédagogiques de ce pédagogue : le tutorat.""

In "Missionsgeschichte als Geschichte der Globalisierung von Wissen: Transkulturelle Wissenaneignung und -vermittlung durch christliche Missionare in Afrika und Asien im 17., 18. und 19. Jahrhundert", eds. Ulrich van der Hayden and Andreas Feldtkeller (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012): 193-212.

S emeia is an experimental journal devoted to the exploration of new and emergent areas and methods of biblical criticism. Proposals for volumes employing the methods, models, and findings of linguistics, folklore studies, contemporary literary criticism, structuralism, social anthropology, and other such disciplines and approaches are invited.

In this paper I chart the trajectory of a Moustached Treeswhift (Hemiprocne mystacea) at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, as a way to think about the collecting networks involved in all natural history specimens and the role of the London Missionary Society in natural history.

Cet article aborde la question des triades au sein de la diaspora chinoise autour de Malacca, du Johor et de Singapour au XIXe siècle, au travers de deux regards missionnaires : celui du révérend William Milne (1785-1822), de la London Missionary Society, et celui du père Augustin Périé (1832-1892) de la Société des Missions étrangères de Paris.

Leurs approches, très différentes et donc complémentaires, permettent d’une part de mieux cerner les contours socio-économiques qui favorisent alors l’emprise des sociétés secrètes sur les planteurs, commerçants et marins chinois de la zone. D’autre part, la démarche autorise à formuler une hypothèse sur l’origine intellectuelle du mot « Triade », que William Milne a vraisemblablement puisé dans ses réflexions sur la traduction de la Bible en chinois afin de qualifier cette réalité sociale à laquelle il était confronté. Cette transposition, que l’on peut considérer comme étant du registre d’un « ornementalisme herméneutique », semblait jusque-là avoir totalement disparu derrière l’emploi orientaliste de ce terme par les autres acteurs coloniaux (militaires, marchands, administrateurs…), qui l’ont repris mécaniquement à leur compte face à cette à l’altérité inquiétante dans le pourtour de la mer de Chine méridionale.

The accounts of the eighteenth-century explorers have forged the Tahitian myth by describing the great sexual freedom enjoyed by Polynesians. While these explorers were inclined to praise it, the Protestant missionaries strongly disapproved it. This article firstly examines how the British Protestant missionaries from the London Missionary Society (1797-1863) and then the French missionaries from the Société des missions évangéliques de Paris have contributed to the elaboration of new sexual norms, which are exemplified in the marriage obligation. In a second part, the article looks at the missionary literature in order to shed light on the active role played by both Western and Polynesian women in the evangelization of Tahiti and its “adjacent islands”. It shows how this women dynamism sometimes worried the Western male missionaries who, as part of their “civilizing mission”, aimed to maintain the gender and racial hierarchies.