Protestant Missionary Education and the Diffusion of Women’s Education in Ottoman Turkey: A Historical GIS Analysis

A significant literature demonstrates that the presence of historic missionary societies—especially Protestant societies—during the colonial period is significantly and positively associated with increased educational attainment and economic outcomes. However, we know less about the mechanisms underlying the long-run consequences of institutions, as it is commonly very hard to disentangle direct effects from indirect effects. One clear way to do so, however, is to explore the long-term impact of missionary influence in places in which the direct beneficiaries of missionary education are no longer present. The present article considers one such region, the Anatolian region of the Ottoman Empire. Due to the ethnic violence and population movements at the start of the twentieth century, the newfound Turkish nation-state was largely religiously homogenous. This provides us with a unique situation to empirically assess the long-run indirect effects of Christian missionary societies on local human capital. For this purpose, I present an original dataset that provides the locations of Protestant mission stations and schools, Ottoman state-run schools, and Armenian community schools contained within Ottoman Anatolia between 1820 and 1914. Contrary to the common association found in the literature, this study does not find missionary presence to be correlated with modern-day schooling. Rather, I find that regions with a heightened missionary presence and an active Christian educational market perform better on the gender parity index for pretertiary schooling during both the Ottoman and Turkish periods.

The Action Chrétienne en Orient: From Missionary Society to Fellowship of Churches

The Action Chrétienne en Orient was founded in 1922 in order to bring relief among displaced Christians, especially Armenians, in Syria. It also supported the displaced Protestant communities in their ecclesiastical, educational and medical work. In structure the ACO resembled other Protestant missionary societies, but it had some unique features such as its trans-European character. At the time of the decolonization, the work of the ACO changed as the local Protestant churches took charge and the ACO devolved its responsibilities. In the postcolonial period the ACO gradually embraced a missiology that was focused on partnership. This led to the formation of the ACO Fellowship, a communion of churches and mission agencies.

Solastalgia and Hope

This paper draws attention to the social as well as global consequences, but also to the profound emo­tional impact of the ecological crises from a theological perspective. The phenomenon of solastalgia, as well as the loss of holistic thinking, manifests itself as emotional or existential distress caused by environmental changes, re­sulting in the loosing of home, identity, and culture. In order to provide a response to these urgent theological as well as religious education challenges, this article makes a twofold attempt: On the one hand, it deconstructs the entanglements of Christian missionary societies in European colonial structures of domination that helped legiti­mize the exploitation of natural resources. This includes the understanding that in the name of Christianity, the suppression of indigenous forms of knowledge and cognition, which contain a treasure of concern for nature and forms of sustainable living, was legitimized. On the other hand, the engagement with these historical lines of devel­opment, however, opens up the opportunity to re-engage indigenous narratives of hope in religious education processes and to make their alternative world relations constructive, which is fed by a dialogue with indigenous episte­mology and spirituality. The aim of this paper is to find out what new insights emerge from this dialogue of contexts between the Pacific and Europe and what new horizons they can offer for religious education.

Early Nineteenth-Century ‘Murmurings and Disputings’ in the Ultra-Ganges Missions

As messengers of a peaceful gospel, the ‘Christian soldiers’ put in charge of expanding the remit of the London Missionary Society to South-east Asia and, eventually, to South China frequently found themselves at war with each other. Based on the personal correspondence of missionaries stationed at Melaka, Batavia and Guangzhou, the present article analyses both the challenges faced by the missionary circle as well as the disagreements which developed. The Protestant missionaries sailed in the wake of the Dutch and British navies after the Napoleonic wars. They thus found themselves both protected and held at ransom by the colonial politics which ensued, resulting in personal decisions which could pit individual missionaries against each other. Not a few missionaries were of continental European origin – for example, Thomsen, Brückner and Gützlaff – accentuating rivalries between the colonial enterprises and between competing missionary societies. Differences in personality, such as Robert Morrison’s proverbial severity or the schoolmastery of William Milne, did little to alleviate such tensions. But arguably the most important reason for the ‘murmurings and disputings’ observed by Robert Morrison was radically different outlooks concerning the objectives of the mission. These related to conversion methods, to the educational paradigm of the Christian missions, and methods of outreach, pitting a highly mobile ‘entrepreneurial’ approach against the stability of the mission stations. Importantly in the polyethnic composition of south-eastern Asia, opinions differed on the utility of the Malayan languages, South Chinese vernaculars or the language used by Chinese officials. Dissension within the Ultra-Ganges Missions arose from the essential bifurcation between life in the ‘here & now’ and a future destiny in China.

Neutrality is Impossible: Nationalism, Unequal Treaties and the National Christian Council of China 1925-1926

"This article takes the National Christian Council of China (NCC) as a ease study. By examining the responses from various stakeholder both mainline Chinese Protestants and western mission within the NCC to the campaigns for the abrogation of the unequal treaties during the period of 1925——1926, it aims to reveal the tension and interaction between Christian missions? Chinese churches and the nationalist discourse. This article argues that although both Protestant missions and Chinese churches were in general the beneficiaries of the utoleration clauses“ of the unequal treaties and were aware of the necessity of drawing a clear borderline with the treaties > the two parties viewed the matter from different standpoints. To the majority of the missionary societies associated with the NCC > it was a diplomatic matter to be solved through formal negotiation between the governments. Whereas to most of the mainline Chinese Protestants> it had developed into a fundamental factor causing not only Christianity's unfavourable position in Chinese society, but also China's backwardness and uhumiliation. Considerably influenced by the nationalist discourse? they ardently engaged themselves in the campaigns to abrogate the unequal treaties > individually or as a group. Specific Chinese socio-political context and the nationalist discourse contributed significantly to the divergence of views. The NCC, incorporating both sides?was obliged to make a prompt response to the treaty issue and struggled to find common ground among the cooperating bodies.

Africa

Jonathan Edwards’s attention to Africa cannot go unnoticed, as articulated in his A History of the Work of Redemption. Less attention, however, has been given to the reception of Edwards’s works in Africa. This absence in Edwardsean research is remarkable, as many of his works have been reprinted, translated, and published from the eighteenth century onwards, particularly by those who had a vested interest in missionary movements and societies labouring throughout Africa. In fact, the reception of Edwards’s thought in Africa is primarily through the work of nineteenth-century missionaries and missionary societies—willing or unwilling participants of the colonial European expansion in Africa. Several of his works translated into Arabic, Dutch, English, French, and German found their way from Cairo to Cape Town. This chapter, then, is a preliminary overview from North Africa to Southern Africa of the distribution, use, and appropriation of some of Edwards’s works throughout the continent.

Introduction

This chapter discusses the history of translations in Arabic literature. The book begins with the first translations performed by Lebanese and Egyptian translators under the auspices of British missionary societies in Malta in the 1830s and ends in the first decade of the twentieth century with the translations of British and French sentimental and crime novels published in Cairo. Each connects the purportedly marginal enterprise of translating foreign fiction, performed by well-known and forgotten translators, to the concerns of canonical nahḍa thinkers and the literary and cultural debates in which they participated. These authors developed translation techniques and writing styles that cultivated a new mode of reading that the book calls reading in translation, which required the reader to move comparatively within and among languages and with the awareness of the diverging interpretive frameworks that animated the investments of multiple audiences. Far from being mere bad translators, these authors appear as translation theorists and informed commentators on literary history. Presenting their own work as occurring within an ongoing history of translation rather than deviating from it, these translators contend that the Arabic novel takes translation and cultural transfer as its foundation, as does the European novel. This book takes the implications of these translators' claims seriously, counterpoising them to standard accounts of the novel's supposed travels in translation.