ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the making, as agents of empire, of the Nonconformist missionaries to the Griqua and Tswana, the peoples of the northern frontier of early nineteenth-century South Africa. It examines the background of these churchmen, locating them on the changing social landscape of the time. The chapter seeks to provide a kind of imaginative sociology—that is, a sketch of the social and cultural forms that shaped their imagined world, their life-context as they regarded it. By 1810, the industrial revolution had cut deep into the physical, social, and cultural terrain of Britain. The fact that they came from—from the ideological core yet the social margins of bourgeois Britain—was not only to affect their place in colonial society and its politics. The immediate corollary of the image of the self was that the social values of bourgeois ideology could be internalized as qualities of individual personality.