Rethinking Britishness: Religion and Debates about the “Nation” among Britons in Company India, 1813–1857

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the intersections of religion and national identity among Britons in nineteenth-century colonial India. It argues, contrary to Linda Colley and other scholars who have asserted a pan-Protestant nature of Britishness, that religion frequently was a site of division among Britons in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. Anglicans such as Claudius Buchanan wished to cement an Anglican hegemony within the empire. Presbyterian chaplain Dr. James Bryce, by contrast, advocated for the Churches of Scotland and England to be coestablished. Roman Catholic priests, less successfully, argued for similar rights to be extended to Roman Catholicism, the religion of close to a majority of British troops serving in India. Lastly, Baptist missionaries questioned the East India Company's continued support of Hinduism through its collection of pilgrim taxes, which they labeled as “anti-Christian.” These competing visions of “Greater Britain” in religious terms point to the fragility and divisiveness of national identity in the nineteenth-century British Empire, an institution scholars have generally claimed fostered a sense of Britishness.