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Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer: Formen und Mechanismen protestantischer Expansion in der atlantischen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts (The Ebenezer colonial project: Forms and mechanisms of Protestant expansion in the 18th-century Atlantic world)

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jax333

1945-2314

A. G. Roeber,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Alexander Pyrges's monograph examines the expansion of early modern Protestant communities based on an “analytical terminology” that allows one to explore and compare the social dimension of Protestant communities traditionally investigated under categories of “established” or “free” churches, or through particular linguistic, theological, and geopolitical circumstances. Pyrges devotes two hundred pages to an exploration of seventeenth-century Protestant “forms and mechanisms” of expansion and the specific British and German-speaking actors behind the Georgia settlement of Ebenezer. Those unfamiliar with the role played by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Samuel Urlsperger and the Augsburg supporters of the exiled Salzburgers, the famous pietist center at Halle, and the clergy who served the Georgia settlement will discover how difficult cooperative work among the participants proved to be. To keep track of the multiple actors and disagreements that swirled around the objectives promoted for the colony, Pyrges relies upon an exploration of “network communication.” In his forty-one-page introduction, Pyrges summarizes the state of research and the theoretical basis for “network” analysis. He turns to the specifics of those networks in his third and fourth chapters, on the raising, exchange, and distribution of funds and the circulation of letters among the participants in the colonial experiment. The manner of sending money helped shape the communication networks in the European and the Atlantic contexts. He turns in the fifth chapter to the way the focus on physical sickness, as well as medical and spiritual concerns for healing the inhabitants of the Salzburger settlers, reflected the pietist determination to create a “new” and “renewed” Christian believer. The suffering of settlers exposed to diseases described in the correspondence was not the topic of interest. Rather, how the sufferer dealt with these challenges as part of the renewal process explains why these ailments were detailed, serving to stir up interest among potential supporters of the experiment as well as reassuring those already invested that despite the deaths and financial setbacks, the project remained fundamentally sound. In his sixth chapter, Pyrges examines the contrasting images of the settlement as “desert” and “vineyard”—themes he connects to other colonial experiments. Ebenezer was simultaneously a settlement in the wilderness, clothed in the well-developed Old Testament image of the Israelites' long journey in a desert that nonetheless provided opportunity for growth in holiness and well-being. The trustees of the colony could look on with satisfaction when the fragile, precariously situated religious refugee community of Ebenezer passed into more prosperous times. European pietist supporters of the enterprise used Ebenezer as an example of a vineyard situated in the wilderness, a paradigm for what could be accomplished if true Christians could be established away from the corruptions of a too-worldly European church and society. Despite hopes that Ebenezer would stand as beacon and example for renewed Protestant Christianity beyond Georgia, however, the community's experimental days came to a close as did the radical, transatlantic attempt to reshape European Protestantism through these complex networks of exchange and communication. Whatever reshaping of American Protestantism emerged from the revolutionary era, those developments had little in common with the networks and structures of pre-1750s Georgia.