Full Description
Spirits of extraction revisits the troubling history of socially reformist, ostensibly anti-racist, Christianity and its role in the expansion of the extractive industries, British imperialism, and settler colonialism. The book explores key moments in the history of Methodism and the evangelical movement. Colonial fears, and the attempt to 'civilise savages', were crucial to the movement's foundation in eighteenth-century industrialising Bristol, England. Through the culture of the Cornish mining diaspora of the nineteenth century, Methodism enmeshed with all the complexity of race and labour-structures of the British empire. At the same time, in Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canda/Ontario, Methodist missionaries laid the foundation of abusive education and racialised ideas of redemption that both enable and sacralise the mining industry. Through these histories of our present, the book theorises the relation of religion and education to racism, modernity, biopower, extractivism, and the geology of race.
Contents
Introduction: John Wesley's ghost and the metaphysics of race
1 Savage encounters and the scene of evangelical awakening in Bristol, England
2 Mining, methodism and the geology of race in the Cornish diaspora
3 Methodist missions, Ojibwe Copper, and civilisational education in Upper Canada (Ontario)/ Anishinaabewaki
Afterword: Bristol in the colonial present, 2024
Bibliography
Index
