Experts
Two hundred people crowded into the assembly hall, eager to hear Samuel Wells Williams’s lecture about China. It had been twelve years since Williams had left the United States for Canton and Macao in 1833, and much had changed in the meantime. Then, the Chinese government limited Western access to the country and restricted visitors to Canton, the single port that housed all of China’s commercial exchange with Europe and America. Williams had joined a small American community of merchants who lived side by side with their peers from other foreign countries and strained against the limitations placed on them by the Chinese government. Non-Chinese residents were not even supposed to be able to learn the language. Merchants and missionaries alike wanted access to more of China—to markets and souls, respectively—and they prickled at the perceived self-importance of the Chinese who wished to contain them. But by the time Williams mounted the lectern in 1845, new treaties had opened up new ports to US diplomats, merchants, and missionaries. In the wake of the Opium Wars between Britain and China, the possibilities for Sino-American relations seemed to be entering a new era.
Americans, Williams found, were hungry for information. They wanted to learn about economic opportunities and about the spread of Christianity in this part of the world that had long seemed mysterious and distant. And so Williams embarked on a speaking tour. He found that audiences trusted him to explain Chinese “polity and character” as a true expert. He could, after all, claim to have lived for years in China among the Chinese, “speaking their language and studying their books,” as he put it. Williams lectured to audiences in cities like Utica, Cleveland, Buffalo, and New York, teaching them about China and its geography, population, arts, customs, and science. To bring this information to a still wider audience, Williams expanded his lectures and published his work as The Middle Kingdom in 1848.1
It was a large book, aiming to be a “survey of the geography, government, education, social life, arts, religion, &c” of China. Its twelve hundred pages were originally bound into two volumes with bright yellow covers, richly illustrated by a scene at a Chinese gate. A group of men are pictured walking through the portal, dressed in what Americans would recognize as Chinese garb. In the foreground, a young Chinese woman sits, her parasol resting at her feet. Dragons top the structure, which is engraved with Chinese characters. Inside the book, Williams provided a translation for his US readers: “He who is benevolent loves those near, and then those who are remote.”2 This definition of benevolence, he hoped, might prick the attention of US readers and cause them to take to heart his lessons about a group of people who lived so far away.
The Middle Kingdom granted US readers a window into the Chinese Empire that had only recently been opened for US diplomats, merchants, and missionaries. The title page lists Williams’s credentials as a linguistic expert: he is author of Easy Lessons in Chinese and English and Chinese Vocabulary. What he is not identified as is a missionary. But that is precisely what he was.
Williams had been sent to China by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) as a printer, tasked with running a press in both the Chinese and English languages. In China, he was among the first of the missionary diplomats, finding ways to link his evangelistic work with efforts to secure US political and commercial presence in the country. Over the course of his career, he served both the ABCFM and the US Department of State. As an author, he brought his missionary and diplomatic worlds into harmony between two yellow covers. Though he elides his missionary identity in some places in the book, it is evident in others: the lectures in upstate New York and Ohio were fundraisers for a Chinese type for the missionary press. Those who encouraged him to publish the book had done so in the hopes that the information he shared could raise American enthusiasm for the evangelization of China. At times, his analysis of China revealed his commitment to transforming it through Christianity, as when he discussed the legal system in the country. If the laws were well and fairly administered, Williams reflected, “it would be incomparably the best governed country out of Christendom,” but the corruption and “wicked rulers” got in the way. As Williams explained, this went to prove “the utter impossibility of securing the due administration of justice without higher moral principles than heathenism can teach.” Christian evangelism was needed to ensure good order.3
FIGURE 2.1. Title page, Samuel Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom. The title page illustration is from the 1848 original edition.
Reviews of the book reflected this dance between emphasis and elision of Williams’s missionary identity. In the religious and the mainstream press, readers celebrated the book for its comprehensive view of China and recognized the author as an expert, by virtue of his long residence and diverse knowledge. That it was missionary work that brought him to China, and that his missionary background might have shaped the picture of China he provided, was not always as carefully noted.
Williams was hardly the only missionary who wrote about his field for US audiences. In the first decades of the century, missionary intelligence could be found in published letters and journals that appeared in magazines and newspapers, as well as a few early books. By the mid-nineteenth century, the genre became prolific. Missionary-authored historical works and travel narratives ran a wide range. Pious memoirs of missionaries and converts, such as those of Harriet Newell or Catherine Brown, found wide audiences eager to emulate the lives of these Christian exemplars.4 Other readers flocked to missionary histories, such as Rufus Anderson’s multiple histories of the ABCFM, the missions to India, and the missions to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i).
Still others, including many who might not have even cared about missionary work itself, would sit down to read the general histories and travel narratives that came from missionary pens. On India, they might pick up David Allen’s India, Ancient and Modern (1856), or Hollis Read’s India and its People, Ancient and Modern (1859). If they wanted to learn about Hawai‘i, they might turn to Hiram Bingham’s The Civil, Religious, and Political History of the Sandwich Islands (1847). Cyrus Hamlin’s Among the Turks (1878) or Bible Work in Bible Lands, by Isaac Bird (1872), might teach them about the Ottoman Empire. John Leighton Wilson’s Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (1856) was the first American history of that region. The missionary identity of these authors shaped the histories that they told but did not limit their readership. For the most popular titles, missionary authors were able to claim expertise from their experiences without implying that only religious readers would profit from the information that they shared.
The full range of missionary intelligence revealed strikingly broad claims of expertise. An 1881 tabulation of missionary literature coming out of the ABCFM alone counted thirty-two missionary authors who appeared in the Journal of the American Oriental Society at least once, thirty-four in Bibliotheca Sacra, and twenty in the New Englander. By that time, forty-five memoirs of ABCFM missionaries had been published, alongside nine of prominent converts, twenty-seven works of history, and fifty-five books on travel and miscellaneous subjects.5 These works collectively served to argue that missionaries were figures who could explain the world to America and America to the world. By the middle of the century, leading geographers admitted their reliance on missionary sources, praising missionary periodicals like the Missionary Herald as “a rich store of scientific, historical, and antiquarian details” that could not be found elsewhere.6
Some Protestant critics worried that this emphasis on missionary intelligence was too worldly, drawing the focus too far away from evangelism. But missionary leaders such as David Greene of the ABCFM well understood that “there is no method more effectual in awakening a missionary spirit” than missionary intelligence. Not only did the ABCFM want to educate Americans about “the superstitions and idolatry, the vice and the wretchedness of the people, together with their customs and manner of life,” they also found that geographical information could help to “bring the heathen distinctly before the mind, to give a knowledge of their condition and wants and awaken and keep up a lively interest in them.” This wide-ranging missionary intelligence would inform the community of the importance of missionary work.7
Power is at the heart of discussions of expertise. In claiming to be experts, missionaries were participating in the sort of knowledge production about the colonized world for Western audiences that marked many imperial projects of the nineteenth century. Experts knew the world, and as they translated and packaged that knowledge for Western consumption, they asserted a power over the people they described. They claimed to create order out of disorder and to reveal what had previously been mysterious, often positioning themselves as rational and enlightened observers. Missionary claims of expertise helped to enforce an American (and European) worldview that justified and accepted as natural the dominance of the West over the East. The power relations of missionary expertise could have important real-world effects.8
Missionary leaders in the 1820s and 1830s understood that ignorance was a problem. When they tried to understand the reasons why more US Christians did not eagerly fund the work of foreign missions, they continually returned to the theme of ignorance. The problem, they were sure, was that not nearly enough Americans knew about the world, its people, or their needs. The solution was to simple: teach them.9
Missionary authors like Samuel Wells Williams returned to similar themes over and over again across multiple genres and for multiple audiences. These texts revealed an ongoing cycle of information that operated between the United States and the foreign world, with missionaries acting as the embodiment of the transfer of knowledge. Shaped by the US context in which they grew up, they went out into the field with expectations about what they would find and what they should do once they were there. These expectations shaped their perceptions and writing, even as their real-world experiences could challenge and alter their preconceptions. When they created texts for American audiences to read, they shared both what they thought was important and what they thought would be of interest: geography and climate, commerce and trade, politics and history, and the role of women. And so these missionary writings would, in turn, shape the perceptions and expectations of a new group of readers who were thinking about the world beyond the borders of the United States. The themes that they returned to again and again reflected a body of implicit assumptions shared by missionaries and many other Americans about the world and its people.
Their work and its reception demonstrate that there was no clear division between “religious” and “secular” texts in this mid-century moment. Efforts to demarcate a secular outside of religion would emerge later, but for many of these mid-nineteenth-century US audiences, a Protestant outlook suffused their understandings of civilization, good government, culture, and society. Neither missionaries nor their US audiences could imagine a world that clearly segmented religious and nonreligious categories. They divided the world in two—the Christian world and the heathen world—and they suffused religious meaning into descriptions of racial, gendered, and political groups. As they shared missionary intelligence with their readers at home, mid-nineteenth-century missionaries claimed the ability to shape American ideas about their country’s place in the world.10
Williams on China
Samuel Wells Williams was born in Utica, New York, in 1812, the same year that the first ABCFM missionaries left the United States for Asia. After he graduated from the Rensselaer Institute, his father volunteered him as a printer for the ABCFM’s China mission. Though he had struggled with his faith as a young man, his mother’s piety swayed him to his future career. In 1831, she had placed a slip of paper into her church’s offering plate that read “I give two of my sons.” She died shortly after, and Williams would find himself in Canton fulfilling her promise two years later.
In China, Williams’s work focused on the publication of missionary texts and the Chinese Repository, an English-language periodical designed for the foreign population in China (though it had some readers in the United States and England as well). It was a missionary project, published on the mission press, but it was not solely evangelical in its goals. Rather, like so much else at mid-nineteenth-century missions, it understood religious change to be part and parcel of a larger cultural and political project. The Repository was designed to introduce the West to China and the Chinese to the West. Funded by the evangelical merchant D.W.C. Olyphant, the Repository’s articles were designed to appeal to the merchants and traders who needed to understand China in order to do business there. It provided Western readers with a window into Chinese history, culture, and politics. While it would have been clear to readers that the writers and editors of the Repository believed that China desperately needed Western influence and intervention, that influence was not solely about Christianity.11
This genre-blurring was typical of missionary writers, who saw little distinction between their interests in evangelism and the spread of Western influence more generally. In China as elsewhere, the missionary project was closely linked to other branches of US cultural influence. Even if missionaries could often find themselves disagreeing with other Americans abroad about how to behave (sailors were a frequent sore spot for missionaries), they by no means disapproved of commercial and political influence as such.12 Rather, missionaries worried that the wrong sort of Westerner would give a poor impression of Christianity. The solution was not to separate missionaries from other Americans abroad. Instead, they sought to center missionary interests within US foreign relations.
Williams was one of the more prominent missionaries to embrace this project. Over the two decades between the 1830s and 1850s, as he joined his fellow missionaries in learning the language, he wrote more than a hundred articles for the Repository on a wide range of subjects: trading rights, the limited spread of Christianity in China, geography, natural history, Chinese daily life, and major political events. It was these articles that would later form the core of The Middle Kingdom. Altogether, this allowed Williams to attract a reputation as an American expert on China.13
In The Middle Kingdom, Williams explained that his audience was “the general reader.” This audience needed information that was, above all else, reliable and accurate. After all, most Americans shared misconceptions about China. They looked to China with a “peculiar and almost undefinable impression of ridicule,” Williams reflected. Westerners looked at Chinese dress, culture, and physiognomy and laughed. They called the Chinese an “uncivilized ‘pig-eyed’ people,” and described them as “at once conceited, ignorant, and almost unimprovable.” Williams set out to vigorously counter all such assumptions and stereotypes. He wanted Americans to understand the Chinese correctly and to approach the people and the country with respect.14
This did not mean he was not interested in transforming China—far from it. His title The Middle Kingdom had a useful double meaning for Williams: it was both the name that the Chinese used themselves for their country, and a way to mark China’s halfway status between barbarism and civilization. Like so many other missionary writers of the era, Williams walked a line of respect and blistering critique, rejecting one set of stereotypes only to bolster another.15
The book itself had chapters on geography, political history, natural history, government, the educational system, the written language, literature, the arts and sciences, architecture, dress, diet, social life, commerce, agriculture, the mechanical and industrial arts, and religion. Over the coming years, there was a steady stream of demand for the book. The book had a second edition in 1849, a third in 1851, and was in its fourth edition a decade later.16 A revised edition appeared in 1883 and was continually in print into the early twentieth century. In addition, an excerpt of just the historical chapters were published separately as History of China in 1897.17 By 1872, sales had been sufficient to sponsor the building of a new hospital in Shandong, named in Williams’s honor.18
Williams found the wide audience he was looking for, and his influence went beyond his book sales. The book was not only reviewed, but summarized and discussed (sometimes at length) in a wide range of periodicals. It was not only the missionary public that took an interest in Williams’s work. Within months of the book’s original 1848 publication, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review argued that readers needed Williams’s work in order to “cure” themselves of their mistaken understanding of the Chinese. For readers who might not have the time or inclination to peruse Williams’s two-volume work, the magazine provided a sixteen-page summary.19 Readers of New Englander, too, received a full-length article on Williams’s work, complete with lengthy excerpts and discussions of the importance of China as a trade partner and “the oldest existing repository of civilization.”20 Shorter reviews in Holden’s Dollar Magazine and The Friend echoed this sense of confidence in Williams.21 In recognition of his work on The Middle Kingdom, Williams was elected to the American Ethnological Society.22
The Middle Kingdom was hardly the first source of American information about China. After all, China had long figured as a space of interest and excitement for Americans anxious to open trade relations. But earlier discussions tended to be brief and marked by offensive stereotypes. The middle of the century and increased contact with China brought with it a new wave of sources that claimed to be more knowledgeable about what China was really like. Williams’s publication emerged as one of the most influential works in this shift.23
If you were lucky enough to live in a place like Salem, Massachusetts, with its long history of East Asian trade and local associations like the East India Marine Society, you might have been able to access even more sources of information. The Essex Library holdings on China are a good measure of what those with the most access to books on Asia could find. In the library catalog’s “General Information” category, only three titles with US imprints predate Williams’s first edition of The Middle Kingdom. These are all limited in their scope: a 1796 reprint of Lord Macartney’s embassy to China, an 1836 sketch of Portuguese settlements and Catholic missions in China, and an 1846 discussion of the tea and opium trades. The other thirty-two general works on China published before Williams in this collection were European imports.
Readers who were more interested in travel narratives had slimmer options in these early decades. While the second half of the century would see an impressive number of US accounts of China from the pens of travelers, the first half of the century was much more limited. The Essex Library held two different 1830s editions of the China journals of David Abeel, a missionary of the American Reformed Church, alongside those of S. Shaw, the first US consul at Canton, and a few other titles: C. T. Downing’s Stranger in China, H. Malcolm’s Travels in South-eastern Asia, and J. N. Reynold’s Voyage of the U.S. Frigate Potomac.24
Such a range of options was a best-case scenario available to those readers who could access such an impressive library. For readers in Boston, being able to access such an array of works could depend on which libraries you had access to. The private Boston Athenaeum, like the Essex Institute, had a good collection of China titles. The Boston Public Library, however, was not founded until 1850 and held only six titles on China in its collections by 1872. Williams was the earliest of these. In other cities and towns, options would have been even more limited.25
Before Williams, then, other books were available to American readers, but none took on the encyclopedic scope that he attempted, and few even attempted to present an evenhanded account of the Chinese people that did not rely on stereotypes and ridicule. His book was popular because readers accepted him as an expert. His long missionary residence seemed to make him so. While not all of his readers were motivated by missionary interests, Williams knew that their acceptance of his understanding of China in America was essential if the work of missions was going to have any kind of long-term success.
Perkins on Persia
Williams was not alone in commanding this authorial expertise, nor was he the first missionary to do so. Justin Perkins, the author of Residence of Eight Years in Persia, was similarly understood to be uniquely situated, because of his missionary work, to describe and explain Persia (Iran) to American readers. As one reviewer explained, Perkins had “rare advantages of becoming acquainted with their manners, customs, habits, character, and peculiarity” that allowed him to write on topics beyond his “strictly missionary” labors. Multiple reviewers emphasized Perkins’s value to readers who did not particularly care about missions: they judged the information the book contained to be honest, interesting, and enlightening. One did not need to care about evangelism to be taken with Perkins’s descriptions of people, places, and adventures—nor did one need to support mission work to be shaped by his worldview. Reviewers expected the book to command a wide audience.26
If Americans’ knowledge of China had been limited and one-sided, the same could be said for their knowledge of Persia. The US presence in the region was limited at this time. From the mission’s establishment in the early 1830s, US missionaries had to rely on British and Russian diplomats for protection; there were no consular or ambassadorial representatives of the United States in the region. Protestant missionaries hoped this would change: the mission was still petitioning the government for a consul in the 1860s. In the first half of the century, then, missionaries could claim a monopoly on American knowledge.27
Justin Perkins had established the mission in Oroomiah (Urmia) in 1834, and his book about the Nestorian Christians and Muslims he met there was published in 1843. He, like Williams, introduced non-missionary topics to his readers. Though the goals of this work had been “strictly missionary,” Perkins wrote, his “observations have been general.” His aim in the book was to entertain and edify a general audience through an engaging combination of “miscellany and incident with accurate, missionary and general information.” He was blunt in claiming his expert status: “No American was ever a resident in that ancient and celebrated country before me,” he wrote. He had taken great care to rely not only on his own personal observation, but “the facts.” Illustrated with a map and colored plates that featured both people and landscape, the book took the form of a journal of his travels through the region, complete with discussions of geography, gender relations, dress, politics, and religion. It was less encyclopedic than Williams’s book and far more driven by anecdote and personal experience. Chapters were not organized by theme, but by the chronology of when Perkins encountered them. Yet even within a diary framework, Perkins was able to cover a wide range of topics and gave readers a similar sense that they were seeing Persia accurately and fully.28
A graduate of Amherst College and Andover Theological Seminary, Perkins was typical of the ABCFM missionaries in these decades. He came from a farming family in New England but would, alongside his wife Charlotte, make his life far from home. In Persia, Perkins focused his attention on the Nestorian Christian population, though his work was not limited to evangelism. Instead, he worked to commit the vernacular language to writing and it was this, as much as anything else he accomplished, that would make his reputation.
As elsewhere, the mission establishment included a mission press and schools: a seminary for the higher education of both boys and girls in addition to local free schools for younger children. In its first year, the press printed 1,600 volumes and 3,600 tracts. Quite quickly, the schools claimed to educate nearly five hundred students.29 Perkins also worked as a linguist and biblical scholar. Like other missionaries with academic interests, Perkins made use of his local contacts to obtain materials for collections in the United States and Europe. Like Williams, then, he served not only as a missionary but also as a scholar, and used that reputation to position himself as an expert on his region of the world for a US audience.30
A Residence of Eight Years in Persia was reviewed in general periodicals, including the North American Review, which considered Perkins’s book to be “of great importance and utility,” even as the reviewer had some complaints about its organization and style.31 The reviewer described the Nestorian Christians of northern Kurdistan as a long-inaccessible community only recently reached by Western travelers, thanks to the interest and enterprise of US missionaries who had been inspired by a single paragraph on the region in a British missionary report. It was this religious effort, the review claimed, that “first enabled the eye of science to penetrate” the region.32 The review claimed there was a symbiotic relationship between scientific and missionary exploration. In 1830, the ABCFM had sent its first missionary explorers to the region, whose book on their travels had already become “well known to be one of the most accurate and trustworthy books of travels which have appeared in modern times.”33
In the interest of space, the North American Review chose not to include the many anecdotes in Perkins’s five hundred-page book about the mission or the Nestorian people themselves. Instead, the scientific interests of the reviewer were reflected in his emphasis on details about the lake in Oroomiah (its depth, length, and elevation; the presence of islands; its salinity and wildlife) and the surrounding mountains and plains. But some of Perkins’s ethnographic descriptions made it into the review as well. Readers learned that the Muslims and Christians who inhabited the region were both “a fine-looking race, of good stature, fair complexion, and with features regular, manly, intelligent, and often handsome.” They were patriarchal and have a custom of “blood-revenge,” both qualities that the Protestant missions would presumably seek to change, though this was not a subject of interest for the review.34
For a review of a missionary text, there is a notable absence of any discussion of Perkins’s purpose in coming to Persia: evangelization. While the missionaries were recognized here for their work in spreading the gospel, they are more vocally celebrated for the intellectual cultivation they brought to the region and for their ability to tell the rest of the world about the Nestorians and their land. As with Williams, Perkins’s topic was understood to be broader than simply evangelism. Perkins was, as reviewers at the North American Review assessed, “particularly adapted to win his way, and be the pioneer of literature and science to a people whose vernacular language was not yet to be written down; and the herald of Gospel light and truth to a nation which had long sat in darkness and the shadow of death.”35 Literature, science, and Christianity—in that order.36
Missionary Intelligence in the American Press
The Middle Kingdom and Eight Years Residence were part of a broader group of “contribution[s] to the progress of literature and science from the pen of a missionary,” as the North American Review put it. These missionary-authored texts had become “at once standard and indispensable works” that would edify both “the devout and benevolent” reader and “the merely curious inquirer.”37 They were written by missionaries but, as reviewers took care to note, should be of interest to a much broader audience. Over the middle decades of the nineteenth century, missionary writings appeared regularly in the pages of this influential US periodical, spreading missionary intelligence to new audiences.
What made missionary literature stand out? Reviewers of prominent titles agreed that missionaries had unique access and a unique perspective. Missionaries could reach people and places that other travelers missed. As the North American Review explained, “Where commercial enterprise has furnished charts of a coast, religious zeal has penetrated the remotest interior. Where scientific research has offered us a few salient features of outward nature, the servant of the cross has gauged society in every dimension and painted it in every respect. Where the philologist has half gleaned and half imagined a scanty vocabulary to sustain a preconceived theory, the missionary has mastered the most intractable dialects, codified their laws and idioms, constructed alphabets, and created a written literature.”38
While such enthusiasm for missionary expertise might be expected in the pages of the religious press, the North American Review was a literary journal with a different profile. Launched in 1815, the magazine covered a wide range of subject matter, including science, politics, and literature in addition to some religious topics. Its publishers intended that the North American Review would be something new: “pure literature” that was “distinctively American in character.” There were few literary and political topics that they did not cover, and missionary intelligence fit in easily with this wide-ranging scope. It was a powerful magazine, widely available and read by people of intelligence and influence—or those who wanted to be seen as such.39
Starting around 1830 and continuing throughout the century, missionary topics and authors regularly appeared in the magazine. After all, as Williams’s reviewer expressed it, without such missionary writers, Americans would know little about the South Sea islands, Asia, Africa, and even much of North America. Missionary literature allowed Americans to become “intimately conversant” about all of these regions about which they had previously been “in utter ignorance.”40 Within the pages of the journal, the missionaries existed alongside other travelers and experts in science and learning who could share information of interest to a general US public. Religion may not have been major topic for the Review in the antebellum years, but travel was.41
Writers at the North American Review valued missionary contributions to knowledge, encouraging readers to see missionaries not only as spiritual figures, but as “men of liberal culture” who possessed “a native breadth of vision and grasp of intellect.”42 In comparing the work of Rev. William Ellis, a British missionary in the Sandwich Islands, with Edmund Goodenough’s Voyage of His Majesty’s Ship Blonde, the reviewers were quite clear that Ellis was both more trustworthy and more entertaining. All of the best material in the other book had been taken from missionary sources, they reported. Given that, the reviewer took offense at Goodenough’s critical descriptions of missionaries. The North American Review dismissed Voyage as “nearly worthless,” and would not have bothered to mention it all, except for the “highly pernicious” tendency of it and similar titles to shape opinions and worldviews. Readers needed to understand that missionary intelligence could be trusted. The journal urged readers to rely on missionaries for their moralizing and civilizing power that was the necessary partner of commercial interests.43
This emphasis on nonmissionary topics within discussions of missionary writings could be found also in the coverage of writings by Hawaiian missionaries. In 1826, the North American Review ran a thirty-one-page review of Journal of a Tour Around Hawaii, a volume published the previous year by ABCFM missionaries. Though the purpose of the missionaries’ tour (and of their report) was to select new locations for mission stations, the review made it clear that this information could be put to far wider uses. In this review, nine pages of which were direct quotations (of a book that was itself only 264 pages), readers learned about the history of the region, its government, religious culture, architectural styles, volcanoes, and linguistics. In addition to the book being reviewed, the article quoted from the Missionary Herald and the mission-authored Memoir of Keopuolani, Late Queen of the Sandwich Islands.44
Throughout, the North American Review argued that missionaries were the authorities who could accurately inform Americans about Hawai‘i. Missionary population estimates corrected those previously circulated by Captain Cook (who had vastly overestimated the population). Missionary research similarly corrected previous philological theories about the links between Polynesian and Malaysian languages. Missionary travel provided accurate information about the size of the volcanoes. Though other Americans were present on the islands, their influence was understood to be negative (these merchants brought the “vices” of civilization).45
The Review’s appreciation for missionary writing resulted in short notices of some titles as well as long-form articles (some even reaching forty pages) based on the contents of missionary publications covering a wide range of political and cultural themes. Readers of the Review would have learned about the Sandwich Islands from C. S. Stewart, about Greece from Rufus Anderson, about India from David Allen, South Africa from Lewis Grout, and Damascus from Josias Leslie Porter, in addition to coverage of China from Williams and Persia from Perkins.46 Missionary memoirs, too, were occasionally mentioned, with articles celebrating the careers of G. D. Boardman, David Tappan Stoddard, Adoniram Judson, and Emily C. Judson, remembered here not so much as a literary figure in her own right than as a missionary wife.47
Missionaries were not the only experts to whom US audiences could turn. These same middle decades of the century saw the publication of Orientalist scholarship that exhibited a similar fascination with exotic foreignness while claiming authority and power. In the pages of the North American Review, these multiple voices could exist side by side. Missionary writings on Islam or Islamic regions, for example, could be reviewed alongside those of Orientalists with both sets of writers presented as equally learned. An 1846 article on George Sale’s translation of the Koran prompted Christian readers to think about Mohammed’s place in world history. The article critiqued the “tone of the Crusaders” that many Western writers on Islam had taken up and instead embraced a more scholarly approach. Despite their religious identities, missionaries were not generally read as modern-day Crusaders, but as experts.48
Reviewers at the North American Review described missionary David Allen and his writings about India in these terms. In a forty-page review of India, Ancient and Modern (1856), the review concluded that the book would become “a standard work of history,—a book of permanent value and of frequent reference.” The article emphasized Allen’s mastery of Indian history, particularly the history of the East India Company. In multipage excerpts, Allen describes the wars between France and England, the relations between the British government and its colonial subjects, the company’s effects on manufacturing and commerce, the extent to which the British government supported education and public works, and the important political question of how long the British could be expected to maintain their power in India and throughout Asia. Allen’s discussion of Christian evangelism and missionary work is only mentioned at the end of the article.49
Allen’s subtitle suggests the wide range of subjects that he considered in the full six-hundred-page volume: Geographical, Historical, Political, Social, and Religions; with a Particular Account of the State and Prospects of Christianity. Like Williams and Perkins, he had written a large and broad book that used a missionary perspective to frame a wide range of subjects. Allen had written for an explicitly American audience. Too much of what was available seemed to be aimed at British readers focused on learning about their imperial possessions. Allen hoped instead to inform his readers about “the state and character of the people of India,” and the political and cultural changes that missionaries and colonial officials had brought about.
The spread of Protestantism in India was deeply important to this missionary who had spent more than twenty years away from the United States. He understood that it was missions that made many Americans interested in India. For Allen, the story of US engagement with India began in the 1790s, when Americans could first read about British missions to the country. He understood the progress of his missionary goals to be deeply connected to all of these other aspects of Indian life and history.50 And based on the reviews that his work garnered, this sense of connection was shared. The Review emphasized the schools that missionaries established (126 of them, serving 14,562 students). These taught the English language which, though it would soon become controversial in some missionary discussions, was here seen as essential. Only English, the Review agreed with Allen, could teach Indian students the literature, science, and theology that would prepare them to become Christian and civilized.
The acceptance of missionaries as experts did not mean that readers or reviewers embraced the missionary cause. Alongside celebrations of missionary intelligence, magazines like the North American Review included criticism of missionary methods and focus. A discussion of Egyptian politics in the 1847 North American Review, for example, argued that “steam and commerce” would be more potent missionaries than either “Jesuit or Protestant.”51 And by 1868, a short review of Rev. C. H. Wheeler’s Ten Years on the Euphrates contained a biting critique of the “primitive missionary policy” that embraced evangelism without a focus on civilization. This sort of work, the reviewer seemed quite sure, “does not seem to be of that large and practical kind which gives any promise of permanent results.” Missionary intelligence was most useful, for this reviewer, when it was paired with attention to cultural change.52
Despite their claims of expertise, cultural biases and stereotypes were evident in missionary writing. Over the course of the century, missionary writings reflected their complex understandings of empire and race. Many missionaries did go out into the field interested to explore and to learn about foreign peoples. Many of them were transformed by the experience. Many more of them remained convinced of the religious and cultural superiority of American Christianity, whatever they had experienced abroad.
The result was that missionary publications were often selective in the versions of non-Christian religions and cultures that they depicted. Often, these writings were decidedly negative in their outlook, emphasizing the superiority of Christianity and Western culture in part out of an interest in fundraising and supporting the future of the missionary movement. Yet because missionaries could claim a more authentic knowledge than other Americans, their depictions could be read as accurate and valuable depictions of the foreign world.53 Missionary biases, then, could be extremely influential.
As a writer for the North American Review put it, the “great diversity” of travel writing was obvious: while some works could “excite attention and reward a careful perusal,” however remote the subject of the work, others could be “nothing but tedious specimens of barrenness and stupidity,” even if they were describing places of tremendous interest. So many of these titles, in fact, were put together “without the slightest sense of responsibility” to the facts, the people, or the places being described. The result was troubling. “Erroneous impressions are made upon the minds of multitudes of all parts of the civilized world; and not a few individuals, who would otherwise have been impartial, form and cherish antipathies which will never be eradicated.”54 Missionaries entered this packed field committed to countering such a trend.
As Samuel Wells Williams’s reviewer in New Englander mused, it may not have been the intention of the earliest organizers of US foreign missions that missionaries would become prominent authors, but this was indeed what had happened. Missionary authors like Williams and Perkins were trusted because readers “know that the authors have had better opportunities than any other foreigners—diplomatic functionaries not excepted—for learning the real condition of the people whom they describe.” American readers needed “just such information as none but missionaries can give or acquire,” not because of their evangelistic value, but because of the expertise they possessed.55 In contrast, the North American Review argued, diplomatic writers were content to focus only on politics and the court, and commercial writers only cared to discuss trade and harbors. To really learn about a place and its people, to get the most “thorough, symmetrical, and trustworthy” information, you had to look to missionary intelligence.56
After the publication of The Middle Kingdom, Samuel Wells Williams returned to China, where he would spend the next several decades as one of America’s foremost experts on the country. He continued to write for US audiences, with publications in the 1870s that took on an increasingly direct political focus. In an article on “Our Relations with the Chinese Empire,” he criticized the United States for failing to treat the Chinese with “the commonest rights of humanity.” Despite a history of good relations between the United States and China, he feared that the United States was increasingly failing to uphold its treaties. Instead, the United States treated the Chinese as “weak, ignorant, poor, and unprotected.” Perhaps most disturbingly for Williams, Americans were working to limit Chinese immigration. He, like many missionaries who had worked in China, argued against these efforts forcefully. “Is not our Christian civilization strong enough to do right by them?” he asked his readers.57
Williams’s history of US treaties with China was written with the perspective of an insider. After all, by this point he was not only a China expert by virtue of his missionary position, but also because of his later career within the US Legation to China in the 1850s and 1860s. He had served as an interpreter for Commodore Perry’s expedition to China and Japan and was then, in 1855, appointed as US secretary and interpreter in China. When he wrote to Secretary of State William Marcy to request a raise, he could trust that Marcy and the members of the House who determined the budget would be “aware of his experience, reputation, and merits, in regard to Chinese dialects, customs, and affairs.” As Marcy put it: “There is cause, indeed, to believe that, in those respects at least, he surpasses any individual in the service of any other government.”58 This trust in his expertise allowed him—like other missionaries of his time—to serve as missionary diplomats.
Williams ended his career as the Yale professor of Chinese and the president of the American Oriental Society. Like many other missionaries of the mid-nineteenth century, he would split his work between evangelism and assisting the American state. By virtue of their perceived expertise on international matters, these missionary diplomats were able to rise to positions of influence and put their expertise in the service of US foreign relations. As they did so, their missionary priorities became enmeshed in their government’s diplomacy.