People, Places and Passions by Russell Davies

Author:Russell Davies [Davies, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Modern, 19th Century, 20th Century, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781783162383
Google: 9-uVDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2015-06-15T03:12:22+00:00

‘Rwy’n gweld o bell’: religion and imperialism

O bob ymffrost, ymffrost crefyddol yw’r gwrthunaf.

(Of all bombast, religious bombast is the most revolting)

Robert Ambrose Jones, Y Faner, 20 December 1882

As the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century, a complicated interrelationship developed between Christian evangelisation in Africa, America and Asia and the emergence in Wales of a new narrative of modernity that was enshrined in the concept of progress. To many authors, imperialism was an honourable pursuit, based on the laudable motive of civilising the barbarian. In contrast to the Roman Empire – which was enmeshed in vulgarity, venality and violence – the British Empire was valorous, victorious and virtuous. The claim was often made that Britain’s empire was won as the result of virtue, not vice.33

In essence, three ideological strands were deeply intertwined in the fabric of the Welsh involvement in empire. The first was the wish to be associated with the higher ideals of one of mankind’s most civilised races, the British, who had a ‘sacred trust’ to civilise and manage the property of their colonial subjects. Lands and resources would be best looked after by the British until ‘the child races’ or ‘infant races’ were capable of looking after them for themselves – and the longer that process took, the better it would be for the British. The second thread in the imperial tapestry was the practical extension of evangelism, it being Britain’s duty to convert subject peoples to Christianity. The third ideological component was linked to growing support for the principle of basic human rights for all peoples. This concept emerged in the nineteenth century but gained support in the twentieth due to the influence of two groups which are traditionally seen as opposed to each other – trade unions and merchants. Trade unionists emphasised the rights of all workers; notable examples of Welsh origin were Thomas Jessie Jones and David Ivon Jones, who championed the rights of workers in the USA and in South Africa. Merchants argued that free trade was the most effective generator of human rights, as ‘commerce would ensure the fundamental human right of freedom from suffering’.34

Other factors in the creation of the empire, such as greed, Godlust or glory, were downplayed, diminished and even denied. Emrys ap Iwan, in trenchant and sophisticated articles in Baner ac Amserau Cymru at the close of the nineteenth century, was a sharp critic of Welsh subscription to concepts of modernisation and Christianity and of their subservience to a British, and especially to an ‘English’, empire. But his was something of a rare voice wailing in the wilderness.35 Even the spiritual world was not exempt from the crude social Darwinism of the survival of the fittest and the doctrine of progress. Watcyn Wyn gave rousing confirmation to Christianity’s civilising mission in ‘Rwy’n gweld o bell’ (1895). This was more of a war song than a hymn:

Rwy’n gweld o bell y dydd yn dod,

Bydd pob cyfandir is y rhod

Yn eiddo Iesu mawr;

A holl ynysoedd maith y môr

Yn cyd-ddyrchafu mawl yr

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