European settlers in Canada, Australia and South Africa said they were building ‘better Britains’ overseas. But their new societies were frequently threatened by devastating wars, rebellions, epidemics and natural disasters. It is striking that settlers turned to old traditions of collective prayer and worship to make sense of these calamities. At times of trauma, colonial governments set aside whole days for prayer so that entire populations could join together to implore God’s intervention, assistance or guidance. And at moments of celebration, such as the coming of peace, everyone in the empire might participate in synchronized acts of thanksgiving. Prayer, providence and empire asks why occasions with origins in the sixteenth century became numerous in the democratic, pluralistic and secularised conditions of the ‘British world’.

English Christendom has never been a static entity. Evangelism, politics, conflict and cultural changes have constantly and consistently developed it into myriad forms across the world. However, in recent times that development has seemingly become a general decline. This book utilises the motif of Christendom to illuminate the pedigree of Anglican Christianity, allowing a vital and persistent dynamic in Christianity, namely the relationship between the sacred and the mundane, to be more fundamentally explored. Each chapter seeks to unpack a particular historical moment in which the relations of sacred and mundane are on display. Beginning with the work of Bede, before focusing on the Anglo Norman settlement of England, the Tudor period, and the establishment of the church in the American and Australian colonies, Anglicanism is shown to consistently be a religio-political tradition. This approach opens up a different set of categories for the study of contemporary Anglicanism and its debates about the notion of the church. It also opens up fresh ways of looking at religious conflict in the modern world and within Christianity. This is a fresh exploration of a major facet of Western religious culture. As such, it will be of significant interest to scholars working in Religious History and Anglican Studies, as well as theologians with an interest in Western Ecclesiology.

Anglicanism world-wide faces huge problems in the post-Empire era. Churches that were originally founded as colonial and missionary outposts by Great Britain and the United States have now become autonomous Anglican provinces; and what used to be a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon group of churches in the northern hemisphere has become a truly global community, most of whose members live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. Using the experience of the Anglican Church in Australia, Bruce Kaye tracks the modern story of Australian Anglicanism and reconsiders key elements of the New Testament, the English Reformation, and the ongoing theological tradition that relate to this story.

With their power to create a sense of proximity and empathy, photographs have long been a crucial means of exchanging ideas between people across the globe; this book explores the role of photography in shaping ideas about race and difference from the 1840s to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. Focusing on Australian experience in a global context, a rich selection of case studies – drawing on a range of visual genres, from portraiture to ethnographic to scientific photographs – show how photographic encounters between Aboriginals, missionaries, scientists, photographers and writers fuelled international debates about morality, law, politics and human rights.Drawing on new archival research, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire is essential reading for students and scholars of race, visuality and the histories of empire and human rights.