Dr. Carson's book is a welcome addition to the discussion of religion in the British Empire. Her study of the East India Company is an unusually thorough one, covering the entirety of the period of the company's reign from the turn of the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth. This long chronological view allows her to point out continuity and complexity that have gone unnoticed. Her main goal here is to reveal the East India Company as an institution that was not antireligion, as its nineteenth-century evangelical critics charged, but rather one that had to balance the religious views of its leaders against political demands both in England and in India.
Carson's discussion of the eighteenth century is brief, but it provides an important context for understanding the nineteenth-century debates about the role of religion in the empire that make up the bulk of her study. Highlighting the long acceptance of missionaries from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, Carson emphasizes the ways that for many early supporters of the company in Britain, it seemed appropriate to use the company as a way of spreading the Established Church in India. Throughout the book, she returns to this tradition and the ways that it belies the complaints of evangelicals about the company's antimission sentiment.
Carson is also attentive to the breadth of what “religion” in India included. Protestant missionaries, Anglican chaplains, Catholic priests, and Hindus all fall under this category, and Carson is careful to remind her readers that in order to understand how the company responded to religion, you need to understand all of these pieces. The company's official stance was one of toleration and neutrality, though the reality was never so simple. Early on, the company's acceptance of certain kinds of missionaries existed alongside company involvement in Hindu religious festivals. Within England this was viewed as an explicit approval of non-Christian religion. Quite early, then, evangelicals accused the company of hindering the Christianization of India by its alleged support of Hinduism. These accusations, Carson reminds us, ignored the tradition of company support of the Church of England.
The 1790s, Carson tells us, were a time of crisis. Evangelicals became much more outspoken in their desire to send missionaries into India. They stressed two reasons for this. First, they saw the company's expansion into the subcontinent as evidence of Providence directing the British people to spread the Gospel there. Second, they insisted that without Christianity, the people of India were living degraded and immoral lives. As Carson points out, the first of these arguments was not particularly challenging to many leaders within the company: they only questioned what methods might be most appropriate.
This only caused a crisis for the company because its charter was up for renewal in 1793. The greatest contribution of Carson's book is the meticulous detail she provides on the charter renewals of that year as well as 1813 and 1833. Evangelicals, led by William Wilberforce and others, attempted to insert a so-called pious clause into those charters that would, they hoped, allow missionaries unrestricted access to India and commit the company to advancing the cause of Christianity. While the success of the pious clause in 1813 is often read as having done just that, Carson's careful study informs us that it was far more complicated.
In Carson's skilled hands, we get to hear all sides of the debates, including the mixed motivations of different company officials. The Vellore Mutiny of 1806 looms large, as do concerns about the political radicalism of dissenting evangelicals in England. As Carson reveals, this perceived radicalism explains the company's reluctance to allow missionaries of the London and Baptist Missionary Societies to work in India. The company was not antimissionary, she insists; instead, it was opposed to a certain kind of missionary activity.
Carson reminds her readers that missionaries constantly overstated the level of their acceptance in India. The strong and at times violent opposition from Hindus who were concerned about possibly being forced to convert legitimized the company's concerns for stability. It is from this context that evangelicals charged the company with helping neither them nor their Indian converts. Carson gives particular attention to the era of Lord William Bentick in the 1820s and 1830s as a moment of transition toward accepting the evangelical missionary presence. Carson provides a new perspective on the abolition of sati, placing it in the context of Bentick's other decisions, including the end of company involvement in Hindu religious festivals and temples and aid to Indian converts. Throughout these discussions, Carson keeps her reader abreast of discussions in England and India.
The book would have benefited from stronger argumentation on the part of the author in some places. For example, Carson's story concludes with the Mutiny of 1857 and the deeply contested question of whether, or to what degree, religion influenced that event. Carson does not answer that question for us, instead cataloging the arguments that were made at the time. Given her deep understanding of the context in which these arguments were made, this is a lost opportunity.
Similarly, the discussions of how company policy changed could be confusing at times. Individual governors had a good deal of control over the chaplains and missionaries in their territories. As evangelicalism became more common in England, more evangelicals could be found among company officials in India. This is an important part of Carson's story. Yet the nonspecialist might find herself having difficulty keeping track of who's who, what their religious beliefs were, and how they applied them to the situation in India. It is to Carson's credit that she has this level of detail, and she does provide appendices listing the major figures in the company, as well as an “aide-memoire,” to help the reader keep track of the various Hastings, Macaulays, and Munros that turn up in her story. Nonetheless, this impressive study is probably of greatest use to those already invested in the historiographic questions that Carson explores. From that perspective, Carson's research is invaluable.
