ABSTRACT
A well-known trope in colonial and post-colonial studies is 'Christianity and civilization': the nineteenth-century philosophy of strengthening an Evangelical message by concurrently preaching the Christian gospel and importing new technologies into mission fields. The ramifications of this ideal are many and varied, but through it numerous missionaries rationalized that the culture-changing technologies available made them both technologically and morally superior to the indigenous populations they served. Churches were destroyed, prayer books and hymn sheets burned and, eventually, Christians publicly killed. In Madagascar, the 'Christianity and civilization' brought by the London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries included elements of infrastructure, such as a hierarchical network of newly designed and built churches; the solidification of a printed language used primarily for a Malagasy Bible; printing presses; a system of basic and higher education; and even European-style dress. Controlling Malagasy hymnology through forwarding a sense of British style and aesthetics was necessary because of the complicated history of British Nonconformist missionaries on the island.
