“To Serve and Not to Rule”

This essay is based upon a selective survey of the archives of the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), China Inland Mission (CIM), Friends Service Council (FSC), the London Missionary Society (LMS), the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), the Foreign Missions Committee of the English Presbyterian Church (English Presbyterian Mission, EPM), and papers concerning the North China and Shantung Missionary Association. It concentrates on the usefulness of British missionary archives for the study of twentieth century Chinese history and the history of the British communities in China in the late 1920s. ² It grows out of a larger body of work concerned with the structure of British society in China in the 1920s, the processes of socialisation which maintained that structure, and the responses of British institutions to the Nationalist Revolution of 1925 to 1928, and the challenges posed by the coming to power of a nationalist and avowedly anti-imperialist regime. The records used were not only pertinent to that section of the work which dealt with mission history but were equally useful as a source of material for the more general themes, such as relations between Chinese and Britons in the treaty ports. Mission criticisms of the behaviour of British businessmen, for example, are easy to locate and often worth noting; the furious distaste caricatured by Somerset Maugham in his story “God’s Truth” is not unfamiliar, although most comments are more reasoned. ³