Tony Ballantyne

Bio: Tony Ballantyne is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Empire & British Empire. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 12 citations.

Humanitarian Narratives: Knowledge and the Politics of Mission and Empire

Abstract: This essay offers a reassessment of the connections between missionary work and empire building. It focuses on the role of 'humanitarian narratives' in soliciting sympathy amongst British evangelicals and humanitarians for the 'suffering' of Maori during the 1820s and 1830s. Exploring the nature and influence of these narratives not only allows the historian to explore the connections between the empire and British metropolitan culture and politics in this period, but it also provides new insights into why New Zealand was finally incorporated into the British empire in 1840.

Geographies of Contemporary Christian Mission(aries)

Abstract: This paper draws together emerging literature within Geography, and from across the broader social sciences, around contemporary mission and missionaries. It argues for the importance of recognising mission organisations and missionaries not just as historic relics, but as important, active, and geographically far ranging actors in the modern world. In mapping out the little work that has been conducted, three themes are addressed, missionary geopolitics; mission, welfare and development; and transnational migration, religion and cosmopolitanism. The article highlights the potential contributions that a (re)examination of missionary lives, beliefs and praxis can make to these disparate bodies of literature, and calls for further research in these directions within geographical scholarship.

The Contest for Aboriginal Souls: European missionary agendas in Australia

Abstract: This book covers the missionary activity in Australia conducted by non-English speaking missionaries from Catholic and Protestant mission societies from its beginnings to the end of the mission era. It looks through the eyes of the missionaries and their helpers, as well as incorporating Indigenous perspectives and offering a balanced assessment of missionary endeavour in Australia, attuned to the controversies that surround mission history. It means neither to condemn nor praise, but rather to understand the various responses of Indigenous communities, the intentions of missionaries, the agendas of the mission societies and the many tensions besetting the mission endeavour. It explores a common commitment to the supernatural and the role of intermediaries like local diplomats and evangelists from the Pacific Islands and Philippines, and emphasises the strong role played by non-English speakers in the transcultural Australian mission effort. This book is a companion to the website German Missionaries in Australia – A web-directory of intercultural encounters. The web-directory provides detailed accounts of Australian missions staffed with German speakers. The book reads laterally across the different missions and produces a completely different type of knowledge about missions. The book and its accompanying website are based on a decade of research ranging across mission archives with foreign-language sources that have not previously been accessed for a historiography of Australian missions.

Introduction: Negotiating the Religious and the Secular in Modern German History

Abstract: In August 2016, the New York Times published an article under the headline, ‘From Burkinis to Bikinis: Regulating What Women Wear’. The article is illustrated with two photographs. The first one shows a very formally dressed policeman on the beach of Rimini, on the Adriatic Coast of Italy, in 1957, writing a ticket for a woman wearing a bikini. Wearing a bikini (a swimsuit named after the Bikini Atoll Islands in the Pacific, which had become famous after the American nuclear bomb tests of 1946 in that region) was prohibited. At that time, the Italian government as well as most Italians argued in favour of the bikini ban on religious grounds. Following this line of argument, the bikini offended the Christian, in this case Catholic, religion. The second photograph shows three French policemen, dressed just as neatly as their Italian colleague decades before, forcing a woman sitting on the beach of a French town to remove her long-sleeved shirt. This photo was taken in August 2016, and the policemen are enforcing a ban on ‘inappropriate clothing on beaches’, colloquially referred to as the ‘burkini ban’, which had been issued some days earlier. Those who are supporting this ban argue that they are defending the secular, which is violated by religious, particularly Muslim, clothing habits. There were neither bikinis nor burkinis in the German Empire, even though the most common bathing suits at that time were very similar to what is understood nowadays as a burkini – nor had there been major conflicts about Muslim or Catholic clothing habits. However, the recent burkini debate and the steadily growing research field that deals with these and similar contemporary conflicts are perfectly suited as a starting point for an exploration of the religious landscape of nineteenth-century Germany. Until recently this landscape has been described with analytical notions such as secularization or the revitalization of religion.

Sir John Gladstone and the Debate over the Amelioration of Slavery in the British West Indies in the 1820s

Abstract: © 2018 The North American Conference on British Studies. Sir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be improved by making it more humane. Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was a rare but influential metropolitan-based planter with an expansive imperial vision, prepared to work with British politicians to guarantee his investments in slavery through progressive slave reforms. This article intersects with recent historiography highlighting connections between metropole and colony but also insists on the influence of Demerara, including the effects of a large slave rebellion centered on Gladstone's estates (which illustrated that enslaved people were not happy with Gladstone's supposedly enlightened attitudes) on metropolitan sensibilities in the 1820s. Gladstone's strategies for an improved slavery, despite the contradictions inherent in championing such a policy while maintaining a fierce drive for profits, were a powerful counter to a renewed abolitionist thrust against slavery in the mid to late 1820s. Gladstone showed that that the logic of gradual emancipation still had force in imperial thinking in this decade.