Jeremy: Hi, I'm Jeremy Best.
I'm here to talk about my work
Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionaries and Globalization.
It's a manuscript, currently under review
with the University of Toronto Press.
In the research for this manuscript,
I visited 12 archives, 6 research libraries in Germany,
Poland, and the United States.
What it is is a history of 19th century
German Protestant missionary culture.
It's a political and cultural analysis.
That is to say it looks at missionaries,
mission societies, mission intelectuals,
and the supporters of missionaries;
the laypeople who give time, treasure, and talent
to support those organizations.
And in doing so it reshapes our understanding
of colonial and religious history in Germany.
The prevailing view is often that Germany was
far more violent and far more racist than any other country
or great power in the 19th or 20th century,
and that the Holocaust, thus, and German colonialism
belong in the same narrative frame.
My project argues that, in fact,
German colonial and racial thought was
far less monolithic than that.
That there were many, many strands of thought
about who and what the people of the world were.
And then in fact that a history of
German colonial history has to recognize
that the history of all European colonial powers
converges more than it diverges.
And thus the Holocaust is not the
automatic continuation of colonialism.
Who were these German Protestant Missionaries?
In my findings they were univeralists and they were global.
They were universalists in how they saw the world
and how they saw their message.
They understood Protestantism to be an inclusive
faith open to all peoples, and they were global.
They thought about their project not as a project in Germany
and it's colonies, but a project around the world
seeking to bring together all Protestants.
In such, they articulated a clear position that their work
must be independent, it must be international,
and it must be autonomous.
And they refused any collaboration with
German national secular authorities.
The German colonial administration,
German economic actors, and instead sought out
global collaborations with other missionaries.
And furthermore collaborations with indigenous peoples.
Their theology and their world view
emphasized the value of non-western cultures.
It's anachronistic to refer to this
as multiculturalism, in our own time,
but it was certainly a primitive version.
A primitive approach to diversity that
highlighted especially the value of cultures,
except their lack of Christianity, of course.
Which is, of course, a huge exception,
but it is particularly relevant.
Their educational priorities were to create
autonomous, indigenous churches
in schools like this one here at Kisaware
on the coast of German East Africa.
And, in fact, the geography of the movement was global.
I focus on Germany, where they acted in
local and national politics,
I focus on the international world
where they sought their collaborations,
and I use German East Africa, mainland Tanzania
of our own day, as a sight for case studies,
especially of educational, religious, and cultural policies
and their participation and their contests with others.
As a project, this is a history of globalization.
Globalization was and is, not just
an economic or political process,
it is also cultural and religious.
People experience it, not just as a loss of jobs
or a gaining of jobs or as new commodities,
but also as new ideas and new cultural experiences.
And, in fact, as a history of colonialism
and a history of Christianity, this project insists
that the German version of those things is an
important part of the global history of those things.
And that understanding Germany's place in that
helps us understand, all the better,
the colonial history of our time, and of the past.
And, finally, it's a history of race in Germany.
As a history of race in Germany, it demonstrates that
missionaries' cultural inclusivity challenged
other narratives of racism in Germany at the time,
and does not seed the field exclusively to those ideas.
Thank you.
(clapping)
