Faith, Commerce and Reverend David Abeel's Global Geographic Imagination: Mapping 'South-eastern Asia' in Journal of a Residence in China, and the Neighboring Countries, from 1829 to 1833 (1834)

Abstract

In 1829, David Abeel and Elijah Bridgman were the first two missionaries from the United States to set out for China. Over the next few years, Abeel spent ten months in Canton (Guangzhou) ministering, preaching and intensively studying the Chinese language before setting out to distribute printed translations on travels throughout what he calls “south-eastern Asia,” from Batavia, to Malacca, to Singapore, and to Siam, Cochin-China, Cambodia and Borneo. Today, his Journal of a Residence in China, and the Neighboring Countries from 1829 to 1833 (New York: 1834) offers us a useful geographical primer for a particularly eventful decade in US-China relations. Moreover the Journal’s organization of geographical space blends Christianity and commerce in terms of faith that are difficult to settle into conventional secular formulas of a Habermasian public sphere or Andersonian imagined community. Abeel shows that early American missionaries shaped early national identity by adapting conventional Puritan convictions to pursue international print publication during the Second Great Awakening. Depending on his location in the Pacific, he aligns himself with or distinguishes himself from the collaborating missionaries of other denominations and nations. The global system of missionary print publication can also help us explain the ubiquity of “free trade” as a rhetoric that linked frontier expansion on the Far West of the North American continent to civilizing enterprises throughout the Pacific in an idealization of the printed word that made the acquisition of foreign languages a test of one’s resolve to be a better Christian, American, and merchant.