Missionaries, slavery, and race: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world

The missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (the SPG or the Society) played an essential role in spreading the Church of England across the Atlantic world. This dissertation examines the efforts of the organization's Anglican ministers to convert non-European peoples to Christianity in the eighteenth century, and the responses of Native Americans, African-Americans, and Africans to that program. This dissertation argues that two factors shaped this branch of the Society's work. First, a religiously-based understanding of human difference, which stressed the essential unity of all humankind, acted as an impetus for missionary outreach. Second, the Society not only accepted slavery but increasingly saw the institution as a tool for achieving its religious objectives. The SPG provided intellectual support for slavery, and continued to do so into the nineteenth century.; In chapters examining key sites of SPG activity, this dissertation reveals how the diverse actions of Native American and black populations shaped missionary encounters. A community of Mohawks accepted Anglicanism and fashioned it into a set of practices that met its own religious needs. Most Atlantic black populations remained resistant to Anglicanism. At Codrington, an SPG-owned Barbados plantation, African-derived cultural and religious practices remained influential, and enslaved people were aware that the SPG's representatives fatally occupied dual roles as both missionaries and masters. At Cape Coast, the African-born Philip Quaque found his efforts hampered by the slave trade and a Society leadership growing pessimistic about the capabilities of their black missionary.; Finally, this dissertation argues that the SPG's activity provides insights into the history of ideas of human difference. While religion remained an important counterweight to emerging biological concepts of race, eighteenth-century religious views were not static. Faced with mounting evidence that its work was not producing mass conversions, the Society increasingly misinterpreted its missionary history as evidence of basic difference between human populations. In this way religious ideas contributed to increasingly negative assessments of human diversity.