The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop ofCanterbury's Assyrian Mission by J. F. CoakleyReview by: Jeffrey CoxThe American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), p. 561Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2167350 .

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Modern Europe 561

II averted the sort of die-hard defense of empire that the similarly structured French colonial army launched in Algeria.

Written with great vigor and lightened by nice touches of wit, Ingram's work deserves an audience beyond those specialists for whom it will be required reading, if only because the problems of acting the role of a global power are not of merely historical interest.

RAYMOND CALLAHAN

University of Delaware

J. F. COAKLEY. The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Mission. New York: Clarendon Press of Ox- ford University Press. 1992. Pp. x, 422. $85.00.

The world-wide expansion of European Christianity is not only one of the great stories of modern history but also one of the most difficult to tell. The organiz- ing story for modern religious history, the theory of secularization, places religion at the margins of his- tory. Furthermore, the history of religious expansion is inextricable from competing tales of imperialism and anti-imperialism, in which the Christian mission- ary characteristically plays the role of ecclesiastical adjunct to the Western imperialist.

In this well-written history of a small but fascinat- ing mission sponsored by the Archbishop of Canter- bury, J. F. Coakley promises, and delivers, "contro- versy of all kinds, violence, strong-minded and eccentric characters, exotic scenes, adventures, and tragedy" (p. 1). But he attempts to engage not only a celebratory audience eager for tales of missionary heroism but also a skeptical secular audience that regards the entire enterprise as suspect.

The Church of the East was a small, largely rural remnant of the Christian church of the Persian em- pire, usually known as Nestorian, sometimes as As- syrian, sometimes as Syrian Christian. These Syriac- speaking Christians had flourished for a time following the Muslim conquest of Persia, but came on hard times beginning in the fourteenth century. By the early nineteenth century two surviving communi- ties lived on either side of the border between Persia and Turkey, where they were sporadically persecuted by their powerful Kurdish neighbors. They had the further misfortune of being sought out by missionar- ies promoting the competing religious interests of Roman Catholicism, American Presbyterianism, Rus- sian Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism. The competition provided short-term material gains for their clergy, but ultimately led to internal schism and entangled the Syrian Christians in the extremely dangerous politics of Western intervention in Persia and Turkey.

Leaders of the Church of England saw the Church of the East as a kindred Episcopal denomination, resisting the theological aggression of both Roman Catholics and American Presbyterians. Celibate High

Church Anglican clergyman and nuns came to live with the Syrian Christians, not to recruit them into an Anglican church but ostensibly to revive their church from within by creating schools for their children and their clergy, and by training Christian women to be fit wives and mothers. Coakley believes that this mis- sion's distinctive rejection of proselytism removes much of the taint of Western imperialism.

But the relationship between Christianity and im- perialism involves far more than proselytism. Angli- can missionaries wished to persuade the Church of the East to adopt Western standards of education, publish the Syriac liturgies and creeds with modern typefaces, and pursue an aggressive program of in- ternal moral reform. Believing as they did that the Christian church would outlast both the British em- pire and Western civilization, these missionaries did not understand their mission as an attempt to extend Western culture to the non-Western world. Yet in the short term the striking thing about them is their failure to transcend the limitations of late Victorian culture. It is difficult to think of a better label than "cultural imperialism" for a program of training Syrian Christian women to be fit wives by Victorian standards. The missionaries of the Assyrian Mission took seriously their own claims to be nonimperialistic, but by accepting those claims at face value Coakley has missed the opportunity to rethink the relation- ship between Western religion and imperialism.

JEFFREY COX

University of Iowa

CLARE MIDGLEY. Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870. New York: Routledge. 1992. Pp. xii, 281. $69.95.

In this book, Clare Midgley provides not only a much-needed narrative of the contributions made by women to British abolitionism but also a sustained analysis of the particularistic ways in which gender shaped and constrained women's involvement in op- position to the slave trade, campaigns against slavery in the British colonies, and efforts to achieve univer- sal abolition. As considerable contributors to the literature and the finances of these movements, she argues, women channeled their influence in gender- specific directions. Thus, disillusionment with male abolitionists' tactic of parliamentary petitioning led women to initiate abstention campaigns in which individual female consumers were encouraged to boycott sugar and other slave-produced goods. Simi- larly, the networks of women's antislavery societies that emerged in the 1820s deployed their funds to their own abolitionist ends. In Birmingham, this policy of selective funding sustained a cadre of trav- eling antislavery agents; in other regions it promoted education, relief, and Christian conversion in the British West Indies. In this manner, antislavery activ- ities came to assume a gendered configuration: male

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1994

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