Returning Kindness Received'? Missionaries, Empire and the Royal Navy in Okinawa, 1846-57
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5748288 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R S G Fletcher (0000-0002-5893-0572, Northeast Catholic College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 125 |
| Issue | 514 |
| Pages | 599-641 |
| Publication date | 2010-05-27 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/ceq157 |
| OpenAlex | W2020855521 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
THIS paper explores the origins, development and impact of one particular enterprise emerging from the explosion of christian missionary activity in the nineteenth century: the Loochoo Naval Mission. Active between 1843 and 1857 in the Pacific island chain of Ryukyu (modern Okinawa), the Loochoo Naval Mission sent the first protestant missionary to modern Japan, and operated during a seminal moment in the history of the islands and of Japan itself. Established and maintained by men of the Royal Navy, and directed by a committee of admirals, captains and lieutenants, this unconventional chapter in mission history was variously envisaged as a gift ‘to return kindness received’ by British seamen, as a means to check the spread of catholicism, as a stepping stone to evangelical and commercial expansion across East Asia, and even as a prelude to British annexation. While past scholarship has focused upon its evangelical methods and achievements in a local context, revisiting this history from an imperial and global perspective reveals a complex triadic relationship between missionary enterprise, naval power and imperial expansion in the mid-nineteenth-century Pacific. Through its struggle to develop the maritime networks to sustain the enterprise, to its ultimate implication in the political and diplomatic agenda of the well-known Perry Expedition to Japan, the record of the Loochoo Naval Mission offers a fresh insight into what happened when the missionary frontier ‘ran ahead of Empire’, and suggests a revised analytical framework for understanding the much-debated relationship between missions and imperialism
Ancient history · Annexation · Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Empire · Frontier · Kindness · Navy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Protestantism · Scholarship · Chinese history and philosophy · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law
| Citations per year | 0.36 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2022 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |