Recent scholarship framing religion as an independent category of human motivation has led to a renewed interest in missionaries as ideological and institutional actors, transforming the way we think about the spread of faith inside and outside the British Empire. Work by Jeffrey Cox, Catherine Hall, Andrew Porter, and others has shown the importance of the play of colony and metropole on the evolution of missionary thinking while also emphasizing the essential role religion often has in identity formation. Esme Cleall's new book seeks to unravel the ways writing on foreign peoples cohered into discourses of colonial difference. Ultimately Cleall argues persuasively that the categories of analysis necessary to understand missionary discourses should be broadened beyond race, class, and gender to embrace understandings of sickness, disability, families, and violence, and that while “principally articulating itself in terms of spirituality, difference was also understood by missionaries through the body” (24).

Unlike many single region studies, Cleall's undertakes a profitable comparative approach by examining the parallel strategies used by the publicists of the London Missionary Society (LMS) to represent both South Africans and South Asians. Relying primarily on published accounts in the LMS's magazine, the Chronicle, Cleall also examines a broader range of differentiators than are typically deployed in discourse analysis, and it is the focus on questions of healthy and violated bodies and families that gives this study its particular interest. When Cleall investigates missionary understandings of disability and illness, she provides satisfying new ways of looking at colonial difference. Her approach reveals instabilities in language as missionaries struggled to establish and police lines that divided Christian from “heathen” and civilized from “savage.” She is at her best when focusing on specific cases, such as the conflict that arose in 1855 in the LMS's Tamil mission between Mr. Nimmo, ambiguously identified as “East Indian,” and the English missionary George Hall, over questions of Nimmo's sexual propriety. Such conflicts often produced profoundly racialized tensions between European and indigenous Christian communities (70–72), but they also reveal the struggles inherent in defining and defending purported, but largely intangible, racial differences.

Cleall identifies essentializing discourses in missionary rhetoric, but she herself tends to essentialize British missionaries into a single homogeneous group, constructing the missionaries of the largely English Congregationalist LMS as stand-ins for all missionaries. By the late Victorian period, when Cleall ends her study, British missions had become highly varied, particularized, and competitive, and ranged from the highest church Anglo-Catholic Anglican missionaries of the Universities Mission to Central Africa to the deepest-hued premillienilist charismatic evangelical interdenominationalists of the China Inland Mission and Salvation Army, with around 40 different, distinct missionary agencies in between—including those of nationalist Wesleyans, independent Baptists, institutionally connected moderate Anglicans, and pietist Quakers. From a mere 10 denominational societies in 1840, by 1910 nearly 60 new missionary agencies proliferated in England, with over 160 within the empire.

Cleall recognizes, as Jeff Cox and others have previously argued, that nearly all involved in the missionary enterprise deployed universally defamatory discourses against non-Western cultures and non-Christian religions, and her study goes some way toward unraveling the mechanics of this published propaganda. But by relying primarily on texts generated or manipulated by LMS editorial secretaries seeking to generate financial and ideological support from a British national audience of contributors, Cleall leads one sometimes to wonder as well what LMS missionaries thought on the ground and how their engagement with complex issues of cultural transference in the context of larger missionary debates of the day worked themselves out. A deeper, more consistent use of the existing LMS archives as well as the many published reports of regional denominational and international interdenominational missionary conferences would help here. The disturbing scope and depth of missionary defamation is clear in the published record; however, the particular ways in which this discourse developed in relation to missionary strategy and religious understanding did not amount simply to a set of distinctions without difference.

Denominational missionary efforts produced distinctive positions on a range of issues, from how to deal with polygamy or the indigenization of churches to the structuring of women's work and the use of “native” agents. Cleall's conclusions about missionaries, drawn exclusively from the relatively theologically and politically liberal English LMS Congregationalist missionaries at the heart of her study, mask this complexity in favor of the elaboration of a relatively homogeneous script. Given such concerns, the reader might sometimes wonder at the applicability of the author's rather frequent sweeping generalizations to the rest of the missionary movement.

The focus of this study is clear and consistent. Cleall explicitly aims to build on Anna Johnston's path-breaking work Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 2007), and elaborating that earlier work into the later nineteenth century proves valuable. Her debt to Catherine Hall is also evident in her approach. The range of secondary citation provided in the book, however, at times suggests a rather narrow usage of the existing scholarship on missionary activity. Thus, the analysis of broader vocabularies—such as those revolving around Victorian understandings of civil society or competitive global imperial anxieties with their theorized injurious effects on indigenous peoples—might usefully expand an analysis focusing primarily on gendered and racialized missionary thinking about marriage, family, and society.

Cleall uncovers important dynamics within missionary discourse. Concerns with women's health, in the context of the rise of missionary medicine in the second half of the century, reinforced ideas about the cultural degradation purportedly undergone by “heathen” women. With the discussion of illness and disability on the table, the hardships of missionary activity could be intellectualized into variable understandings of relative capability. Along such lines of difference, “universalistic conceptions of humanity were fragmented by a focus on bodily difference” (75). Cleall thus provides insight into one of the most persistent ideological tensions at the heart of the missionary enterprise: while conversion was understood in inherently liberatory terms, it nevertheless operated in the context of inevitable inequalities and violence that characterized imperial environments. Equally interesting is the focus on missionary interactions with colonial violence, particularly how LMS missionary propagandists comparatively constructed India as possessing a culturally charged system perpetuating private familial violence, while simultaneously contrasting this formulation with the “savagery” that purportedly generated public tribal violence in Africa. By locating “sinfulness” in cultural systems, rather than in the individual behavior of people, Cleall allows us to see how missionaries could both defame and condemn while simultaneously praising and encouraging, a rhetorical strategy that operated within a larger worldview that generally condemned violence of all types but, when faced with competing forms of violence, legitimated imperial coercion, if not colonial or settler violence, as a necessary form of peacemaking.

Missionary Discourses is an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian missionaries and empire. Cleall has a strong grasp of the play of words and ideas in the creation of colonial discourses. It should be remembered, however, that this is but one dynamic in a more diverse and multifaceted story than the study of one particular line of missionary discourse might suggest.