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Rethinking Britishness: Religion and Debates about the “Nation” among Britons in Company India, 1813–1857

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

Joseph Sramek
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Abstract

This article examines the intersections of religion and national identity among Britons in nineteenth-century colonial India. It argues, contrary to Linda Colley and other scholars who have asserted a pan-Protestant nature of Britishness, that religion frequently was a site of division among Britons in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. Anglicans such as Claudius Buchanan wished to cement an Anglican hegemony within the empire. Presbyterian chaplain Dr. James Bryce, by contrast, advocated for the Churches of Scotland and England to be coestablished. Roman Catholic priests, less successfully, argued for similar rights to be extended to Roman Catholicism, the religion of close to a majority of British troops serving in India. Lastly, Baptist missionaries questioned the East India Company's continued support of Hinduism through its collection of pilgrim taxes, which they labeled as “anti-Christian.” These competing visions of “Greater Britain” in religious terms point to the fragility and divisiveness of national identity in the nineteenth-century British Empire, an institution scholars have generally claimed fostered a sense of Britishness.

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Journal of British Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 822 - 843
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

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References

1 Bryce uses this phrase earlier in the year in a memorandum to the Bengal colonial government. Dr. James Bryce to Bengal Acting Secretary E. Malony, 30 January 1828, enclosed in Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, 7 February 1828, India Office Records, F/4/1077/29263, British Library (hereafter IOR).

2 Bryce to the Very Reverend the Presbytery of Edinburgh, n.d., but probably late 1828, IOR, F/4/1077/29263.

3 This useful term comes from John Wolffe's God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London, 1994).

4 H. V. Bowen argues that, already in the early decades of the nineteenth century, “there was no disguising the fact that the Board of Control was very much the senior partner in its relationship with the Company.” H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2006), 78.

5 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992).

6 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideologies, and Politics during the Ancien Régime, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000); idem, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994); Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York, 2008), 94–95; David Hempton, ed., Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, 1996), 128; Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), 6–12.

7 Murray Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789 (New York, 1997), 132–33; Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003), 159–60.

8 Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 49–50; idem, “North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British Patriotisms,” Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (June 1996): 361–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain, 173; Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg, 2007), 61, 172; J. G. A. Pocock, “The Neo-Britains and the Three Empires,” in The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 2005), 181–98, at 185–86; Julie Shields, Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 (Cambridge, 2010), 25.

9 Hilary Carey, God's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (Cambridge, 2011); John MacKenzie, “Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English Worlds? The Historiography of a Four-Nations Approach to the History of the British Empire,” in Race, Nation, and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present, ed. Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (Manchester, 2010), 133–53, at 135–36, 146; idem, “Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 8 (1998): 215–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 218–19, 231; Esther Breitenbach, Empire and Scottish Society: The Impact of Foreign Missions at Home, c. 1790 to c. 1914 (Edinburgh, 2009), 19–20, 146.

10 Wilson, Kathleen, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720–1790,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 69–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eadem, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), 3–5, 13; Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London, 2002); Tillman Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), 222–24.

11 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London, 2001); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002); Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, 1999); Nechtman, Nabobs; Wilson, Island Race. For the concept of “British worlds” see John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009), 1.

12 In this article, I use the capitalized noun Evangelical to refer to the “low-church” faction within the Church of England, particularly concerning the “Clapham Sect,” while reserving the more generic lower-case noun to refer to the broader movement of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Protestant pietism that included both Anglican Evangelicals as well as Protestant Nonconformists. Penelope Carson cautions that evangelicalism meant different things to different adherents but offers a helpful basic definition of evangelicals as broadly feeling “a deep-seated awareness of sinfulness, a feeling of spiritual insufficiency, and a desire for a personal assurance of salvation through the atoning death of Christ on the cross. Some sort of spiritual crisis was reached, either gradual or sudden, after which the [e]vangelical was converted or ‘reborn’ and turned his whole life to God.” Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858 (Woodbridge, 2012), 25–26.

13 Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, 2002); Carson, Penelope, “Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18, no. 2 (June 1990): 169–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert Frykenberg, “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire,” in Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge, 2006), 473–92.

14 Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004).

15 Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011), 117–18; Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire c. 1700–1850 (Oxford, 2007), 121–22; Carson, East India Company.

16 Michael Snape, The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (London, 2005); Carson, East India Company; Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 (New York, 2011), 42–46, 84–89, 140–41.

17 Copland, Ian, “Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of India under the Company, c. 1813–1858,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (December 2006): 1025–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For the growing literature on imperial anxieties about the conduct and “Orientalized” lifestyles of Britons in India during the eighteenth century and their role in the rearticulation of Britishness in the early decades of the nineteenth, see Nechtman, Nabobs; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800–1947 (London, 2001).

19 In this article, I treat these four groups separately, as they articulated four different religious visions of “Greater Britain.” However, this is not to deny instances of productive cross-collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas, particularly between Claudius Buchanan and Baptist missionaries William Carey and William Ward.

20 This important point has often been overshadowed by scholarly emphasis on either the East India Company's generally difficult relationship in the early nineteenth century with Dissenting missionaries in India or the passage of the “Pious Clause” in the company's 1813 charter.

21 Strong, Anglicanism, 75–77, 108, 132–34, 193–95, 281, 283–84, 287–88; Clark, Language of Liberty, 88, 162, 277–78.

22 Carson, East India Company, 19; Strong, Anglicanism, 118–19.

23 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), 11; Clark, English Society, 300–1; Strong, Anglicanism, 147–48, 166–67, 168; Schofield, Thomas Philip, “Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution,” Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (September 1986): 601–22, at 601–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1850 (London, 1996); Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), 445–46; Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (New York, 1973); Twells, Civilizing Mission, 28–29. On Nonconformist itinerancy and Anglican hostility during this period, see Deryck Lovegrove, Established Church, Sectarian People: Itinerancy and the Transformation of English Dissent, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1988).

25 William Gibson, Church, State, and Society, 1760–1850 (Houndsmill, 1994), 89–96; Hempton, ed., Religion and Political Culture, 33; Carey, God's Empire, 178–79.

26 Strong, Anglicanism, 120, 180; Hempton, ed., Religion and Political Culture, 12.

27 As Lovegrove argues, the hostility among some churchmen toward evangelical Dissent was so intense that “any sign of participation among their own ranks provoked an even sharper reaction.” Lovegrove, Established Church, 109.

28 Chancey, Karen, “The Star in the East: The Controversy over Christian Missions to India, 1805–1813,” Historian 60, no. 3 (March 1998): 507–22, at 511CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the radical-leaning views of the Serampore Baptists, see Geoffrey Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900 (Thousand Oaks, 2006), 32; Duncan Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London, 1979), 194.

29 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 75–77, 79, 80–82; Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford, 2005), 93–94.

30 Claudius Buchanan, “Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India,” in The Works of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, L. L .D. (1805; repr. Baltimore, 1812), 184, 189–90.

31 Buchanan, Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment: Being a Brief View of the State of the Colonies of Great Britain, and of the Asiatic Empire, in Respect to Religious Instruction… (London, 1813), 4, 12, 89–90.

32 Chancey, “Star in the East,” 512.

33 Buchanan, Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment, 114.

34 Claudius Buchanan, “Christian Researches in Asia: With Notices of the Translation of the Scriptures into the Oriental Languages” (1811), repr. in Works, 171.

35 Buchanan, “Memoir of the Expediency,” 184, 193.

36 Buchanan, Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment, 118, 19; idem, “Memoir of the Expediency,” 203–4.

37 Leah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, 1992), 51–52, 53, 62–63; Anthony Smith, Chosen Peoples (Oxford, 2003), 46–48; Clark, Language of Liberty, 48–49, 52–53, 56.

38 Claudius Buchanan, “The Star in the East; A Sermon, Preached in the Parish-Church of St. James, Bristol, on Sunday, Feb. 26, 1809, for the Benefit of the ‘Society for Missions to Africa and the East’” (1809), repr. in Works, 298; see also idem, Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment, 97, 105, 122, for references to the English as a “Christian people” who had a special duty to God to introduce the proper form of Christianity to India.

39 Carson, East India Company, 250.

40 Ibid., 111–12, 139. Nine hundred and eight petitions were presented to Parliament in favor of inserting the pious clause, in comparison to the 123 petitions on whether there ought to be free trading rights in India.

41 Ibid., 144.

42 Porter, Religion versus Empire?, 74; Carson, East India Company, 151, 152.

43 Snape, Redcoat and Religion, 159–61.

44 Carson, East India Company, 144.

45 Bryce to Acting Bengal Public Secretary Alexander Trotter, 28 February 1815; Bryce to Trotter, 17 April 1815; C. M. Ricketts, Secretary to the Governor-General, to Trotter, 30 May 1815; all three documents enclosed in Public Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, 20 June 1815, IOR, F/4/474/11367.

46 Extract Public Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, 24 February 1816, IOR, F/4/623/15904; Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, 22 August 1821, IOR, L/P&J/3/1125, fols. 74–75. Company directors reaffirmed this limit to their donation in 1821.

47 Lord Middleton, the Bishop of Calcutta, to Governor of Bombay in Council, 10 June 1816, enclosed in Extract Bombay Public Consultations, 19 June 1816; Bombay Advocate-General Hugh George Macklin to Bombay Chief Secretary Warden, 28 August 1816, enclosed in Extract Bombay Public Consultations, 19 September 1816; both documents enclosed in IOR, F/4/624/15912.

48 Clow and Members of the Church of Scotland in Bombay to Court of Directors, 21 November 1816, IOR, F/4/624/15912.

49 Pocock, “Neo-Britains,” 185–86; Gottlieb, Feeling British.

50 The Bengal government was then providing St. John's with 912 rupees a month (£114) toward its upkeep while only spending 234 rupees (£29 5s.) for Bryce's church.

51 Public Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, 5 July 1817, cited in Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, 22 August 1821, IOR, L/P&J/3/1125, fol. 92; Bryce to Trotter, 29 July 1818; Bengal Ecclesiastical Secretary Charles Lushington to Bryce, 31 July 1818; both documents enclosed in Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, 28 August 1818; Bryce's Memorial to Court of Directors, 10 September 1818, enclosed in Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, 25 September 1818; all three documents, IOR, F/4/623/15904; Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, 22 August 1821, IOR, L/P&J/3/1125, fols. 74–75, 77, 81–82; Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Madras, 10 April 1822, IOR, L/P&J/3/1360, fol. 66.

52 Andrew Mackillop, “Locality, Nation, and Empire: Scots and the Empire in Asia, c. 1695–c. 1813,” in Scotland and the British Empire, ed. John MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (Oxford, 2011), 54–83, at 73.

53 Ecclesiastical Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, 1 January 1823, IOR, L/P&J/3/140, fols. 269, 271, 273, 279–83, 287.

54 Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, 23 July 1824, IOR, L/P&J/3/1125, fols. 253–54, 255, 256, 260–61; IOR, 14 March 1827, L/P&J/3/1125, fols. 401–7.

55 Bengal Acting Secretary E. Malony to Bryce, 24 October 1827, enclosed in Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, 25 October 1827; R. W. Poe, Attorney to the East India Company, to Malony, 12 November 1827; Malony to Bryce, 15 November 1827; both documents enclosed in Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, 15 November 1827; all three documents enclosed in IOR, F/4/1077/29263.

56 Bryce to Malony, 15 January 1828; Malony to Bryce, 24 January 1828; both documents enclosed in Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, 24 January 1828, IOR, F/4/1077/29263.

57 This memorial is found in the board's copies of company correspondence (or the F/4 series).

58 Bryce to Court of Directors, 25 July 1828, enclosed in Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, 25 July 1828, IOR, F/4/1077/29263.

59 Memorial by Bryce to the Very Reverend the Presbytery of Edinburgh, n.d., but late 1828, IOR, F/4/1077/29263.

60 Carson, East India Company, 199.

61 This did not include the further sum of 23,786 rupees in interest paid by the kirk session of St. Andrews's Church in late 1827.

62 Ecclesiastical Letter No. 2 of 1834 from Court of Directors to India, 20 August 1834, cited in Ecclesiastical General Letter No. 1 of 1835 from India to Court of Directors, 27 May 1835, IOR, L/P&J/3/142 [No. 1 of 1835].

63 Carson, East India Company, 8, 9.

64 Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 1707–1858 (Cambridge, 1985), 112.

65 Snape, Redcoat and Religion, 159–61.

66 Carson, East India Company, 157; Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, 87–88.

67 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Caste, Class, and Catholicism in India, 1789–1914 (Surrey, 1998), 18.

68 Carey, God's Empire, 11; Carson, East India Company, 199.

69 Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 2 of 1836 from Court of Directors to India, 31 August 1836, IOR, L/P&J/3/1126, paragraph 4.

70 Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, 140.

71 Portugal's claim dated to the sixteenth century. In 1721, however, the Vatican had established Propaganda Fide, and gave it jurisdiction over all areas worldwide without formal dioceses. Beginning in the 1790s and lasting until 1886, Propaganda and the Portuguese religious authorities in Goa fought over spiritual jurisdiction of South Asian Catholics. Eventually in 1886, the dispute was brought to a resolution largely favoring Propaganda. Ballhatchet, Caste, Class, and Catholicism; Carson, East India Company, 8–9.

72 Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 5 of 1845 from Court of Directors to India, 17 September 1845, IOR, L/P&J/3/1126, paragraphs 6–8; Ballhatchet, Caste, Class, and Catholicism, 18–19.

73 Ecclesiastical Letter No. 1 of 1838 from Madras to Court of Directors, 23 January 1838, paragraphs 5–8; Ecclesiastical Letter No. 2 of 1838 from Madras to Court of Directors, 27 February 1838, paragraphs 12–27; Ecclesiastical Letter No. 5 of 1839 from Madras to Court of Directors, 10 May 1839; all three documents enclosed in IOR, L/P&J/3/740, fols. 389–90; Court of Directors to Madras, 10 July 1839, IOR, L/P&J/3/1361, paragraph 65.

74 Ecclesiastical General Letter No. 2 of 1838 from India to Court of Directors, 7 May 1838, IOR, L/P&J/3/142, paragraph 11; Ecclesiastical Letter No. 1 of 1841 from Madras to Court of Directors, 16 February 1841, IOR, L/P&J/3/740, fols. 665–66; Ecclesiastical General Letter No. 3 of 1841 from India to Court of Directors, 7 April 1841, IOR, L/P&J/3/142, paragraph 7.

75 Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 4 of 1847 from Court of Directors to Bombay, 9 June 1847, IOR, L/P&J/3/1468, paragraphs 1–2; Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 5 of 1853 from Court of Directors to India, 21 September 1853, IOR, L/P&J/3/1128, paragraph 5.

76 Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 8 of 1854 from India to Court of Directors, 11 August 1854, IOR, L/P&J/3/145, fols. 66, 67–68.

77 Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 15 of 1855 from Court of Directors to India, 25 July 1855, IOR, L/P&J/3/1128, paragraphs 3, 4, and 6–8.

78 D. A. Kerr, Peel, Priests, and Politics: Sir Robert Peel's Administration and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1841–46 (Oxford, 1983).

79 Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, 112–14, 115; idem, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991), 1–2. Wolffe argues that the emotiveness of the backlash in 1850–51 resulted largely from fears about English nationalism being engulfed by the alien “outside” force of Roman Catholicism.

80 Ballhatchet, Caste, Class, and Catholicism, 20, 21.

81 Copland, “Christianity as an Arm of Empire.”

82 Carson, East India Company, 24–25.

83 Bishop of Calcutta to Governor-General in Council, 21 August 1833, enclosed in Extract India Ecclesiastical Consultations, 22 January 1835, IOR, F/4/1535/60923; East India Company Solicitor Edward Lawford to David Hill, Clerk to the Revenue, Judicial, and Legislative Committee, Court of Directors, 16 December 1840, IOR, F/4/1845/77460.

84 Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to India, 20 November 1833, IOR, L/P&J/3/1125, fols. 697–98; Ecclesiastical Letter No. 10 of 1839 from Madras to Court of Directors, 10 December 1839, IOR, L/P&J/3/740, fol. 478; Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 1 of 1845 from Court of Directors to Bombay, 3 January 1845, IOR, L/P&J/3/1468, paragraph 3.

85 James Peggs, India's Cries to British Humanity, Relative to Infanticide, British Connection with Idolatry, Ghaut Murders, Suttee, Slavery, and Colonization in India…, 3rd ed. (London, 1832), 416, 462.

86 Ibid., 77, 109, 134.

87 Carson, East India Company, 8, 15.

88 Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, 76–78. In the Bengal Army, the largest presidency army of the three, high-caste Hindus (Brahmins and Rajputs) comprised close to 80 percent of that army by the early decades of the nineteenth century.

89 Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Delhi, 1998; repr. Oxford, 1995).

90 Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge, 1989).

91 Peggs, India's Cries to British Humanity, 37, 46, 47, 56. Italics in the original.

92 Andrew Fuller, An Apology for the Late Christian Missions to India …, Part 1 (London, 1808), 19; William Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works (1817; repr. Port Washington, 1970), 1:xvii, lii, clxix.

93 Fuller, Apology, Part 2, 126, 127.

94 Miscellaneous Revenue Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, 20 February 1833, IOR, F/4/1819/74986. Carson argues that the change in policy came from the Board of Control rather than the company itself, which was opposed to an outright abolition of the tax, fearing that it would alienate Indian elite opinion against British rule. Carson, East India Company, 191–92.

95 Extract Letter from John Richardson, Member of Board of Revenue on Deputation at Cuttack, to Governor-General Lord Minto in Council, 8 January 1811, enclosed in Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, 5 February 1814, IOR, F/4/1306/51856; Extract Letter from Robert M. Bird, Judge at Goruckpore, to Captain R. Benson, Military Secretary to Governor-General, 8 June 1829, enclosed in Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, 4 December 1829, IOR, F/4/1306/51856.

96 See, for example: Extract Revenue Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, 16 August 1790, IOR, F/4/223/4892; Extract Letter from Mr. Chief Secretary Dowdeswell to John Richardson, Member of the Board of Revenue on Deputation at Cuttack, 5 February 1814, enclosed in Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, 5 February 1814; “Extract Minute of Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, in the Judicial Department, 25 March 1831, respecting the public administration of the Roads through the Bengal Provinces,” both documents, IOR, F/4/1306/51856.

97 Carson, East India Company, 190–91.

98 For example, the Bengal presidency delayed full compliance until 1839 while Madras did not comply until 1841. See Revenue Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, 17 November 1838; Revenue Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, 25 March 1839, both documents, IOR, F/4/1819/74986; Extract from Minutes of Madras Revenue Consultation, 20 April 1841, enclosed in H. Chamier, Chief Secretary to the Madras Government, to James Cosmo Melvill, Revenue Secretary to India House, 20 April 1841, IOR, F/4/1938/84113; and Chamier to Melvill, 8 July 1841, IOR, F/4/1938/84114.

99 Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, 20 November 1833, IOR, L/P&J/3/1125, fols. 697–98; Ecclesiastical Letter No. 10 of 1839 from Madras to Court of Directors, IOR, L/P&J/3/740, fol. 478; Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 1 of 1845 from Court of Directors to Bombay, 3 January 1845, IOR, L/P&J/3/1468, paragraph 4.

100 Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 1 of 1852 from Court of Directors to Bengal, 25 February 1852, IOR, L/P&J/3/1127, paragraph 15.

101 Copland, “Christianity as an Arm of Empire,” 1042. The grants-in-aid, “almost all disbursed to missionary schools, rose from the equivalent of £30,000 in 1839, to the equivalent of nearly £190,000 in 1852–53.”

102 Oddie, “Constructing ‘Hinduism’: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding,” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism, ed. Robert Frykenberg (London, 2003), 155–82, at 167.

103 Carson, East India Company, 217, 221–24.

104 On this broader theme, see also Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, chap. 5.

105 See similarly for Canada and Australia during the nineteenth century, Carey, God's Empire, 26, 82.