British Missionary Publishing, Missionary Celebrity, and Empire

Missionary periodicals dominated the religious press in the early nineteenth century, and the largest British missionary society, the London Missionary Society, disseminated a vast array of religious magazines and books. This essay examines the missionary press through theories of mass media, celebrity, and the democratization of reading. It argues that LMS texts educated the religious British public about the subjects of empire who, it was believed, deserved evangelization as a component of (and sometimes as a corrective to) British imperialism. Missionary texts constructed and maintained a community of evangelical Britons, missionary heroes, and colonial "heathens," a community that provided Financial and moral support for imperial missions and that underpinned the acquisition of knowledge about colonized peoples and places.