ABSTRACT
At the turn of the 19th century, South Asia loomed large in the American Protestant imaginary, and by 1900, a network of Protestant mission stations, schools, hostels and clinics spanned the subcontinent. This chapter examines the relationships between British colonial power and the Christian imperialism of American mission through a case study of missionary place-making in and around Madurai, a city in peninsular India where the American Madura Mission, established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, operated from 1834 to the mid-1930s. It looks at the ways in which American missionaries contributed to Madurai’s urban development, collaboratively and in counterpoint to British activities, showing how missionary place-making, resting on spatial practices and the mobility implied by those practices, drew on and materially mediated their own American-inflected Protestant religiosity; its conversionary dynamic; and the tenets, practices and affective orientations that sustained that dynamic. Mission operations, understood through the lens of place-making, thus provide a granular example of how American interests, shaped by evangelical Christianity, articulated with those of contemporaneous imperial powers while helping constitute a node within America’s nascent moral empire.
