Stuart McKee, Indigenous Enlightenment: Printing and Education in Evangelical Colonialism, 1790-1850

In Indigenous Enlightenment (2023), Stuart McKee provides a synoptic survey of the symbiotic relationship between education, printing, and evangelism that pervaded the British colonial world during the period 1790-1850.McKee situates the development and expansion of evangelical Christian print culture into Asia, the South Pacific, and the US Borderlands within the establishment of various Christian mission societies, whose publications reprinted reports from its missionaries around the globe attesting to the power of alphabetic literacy in aiding conversion.The mercantile circuits of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific limned the edges of this colonial evangelical world, as imperial explorers such as Captain James Cook, and colonial administrative appointees such as William Jones, renowned philologist and author of the Asiatick Researches (1786), were tasked with collecting vocabularies of the Indigenous languages they encountered and supporting missionary literacy efforts.The first two sections of the book explore how emerging language ideologies in Europe facilitated the link between alphabetic literacy and evangelization that Indigenous Enlightenment explores.McKee traces this linkage to the establishment in England of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels (SPG) in 1701 and rightly emphasizes the global vision of its pursuits.As McKee quotes one hopeful Pacific missionary: "We are stretching out our hands to the west and to the east -to India on the one hand and to the Sandwich Islands on the other -and we almost imagine that ere long we shall encompass the globe, and join hands with you in China" (38).The achievement of this global vision of Christian evangelism demanded that the missionaries work on understanding languages only recently known in the West, and then grafting their own emerging theories of literacy education onto projects aimed at "reducing" these languages to writing.First located in the English metropolis and the SPG, the centre of gravity for these efforts gradually shifted to New England in the United States, as the establishment of the American Bible Society (1816), the American Tract Society (1825), and -most importantly -the American Board for Commissioners of Foreign Missions (1810) set in place an industrial infrastructure for producing missionary texts in a variety of non-European languages.Across the globe, this project met with various Indigenous societies whose languages and relations to writing and printing varied markedly.In Tahiti and Hawaii, for example, the vernacular had never been expressed in an alphabetic or logographic form, and thus the missionaries' work began from scratch.In the case of the prospective converts in India and China, however, where there existed well-established writing systems for their Native languages, and in China, locals operated a form of printing that predated the European invention of movable type by a millennium.Given this state of affairs, Indigenous people became critical participants in the missionary literacy project.In previously unwritten languages, locals provided