Translating God on the Borders of Sovereignty

Abstract

Abstract Over the long nineteenth century, translations of Christian scripture into indigenous languages were produced at a far greater rate than at any time previously, a product of both the rise of the modern Protestant missionary movement and the acceleration of British imperial and Anglo settler colonial conquest. This article explores a dimension of the global evangelical translation project: the translation of the word “God.” Where, at the close of the sixteenth century, there were just under 30 different words used to translate “God” in published vernacular, between 1800 and the early twentieth century close to 400 new “Gods” entered the Christian lexicon. Reading translation conflicts for what they tell us about the way power was imagined on the modern Anglo-American colonial frontier, this article argues that contests over the translation of “God” offer a window into the cultural and intellectual dimension of colonial conflict, and reveal a neglected chapter in the conceptual history of sovereignty: at the very moment when the concept of sovereignty was increasingly imagined on the model of the law-bound territorial state, alternative theories of sovereign power entered global circulation.