Historical Notes: The Malfatti Problem in 19th-century China

摘要

Towards the latter part of the 18th century there was England a movement in which humanitarianism and eva gelism were closely related. A prime missionary socie founded in 1795 was the London Missionary Society, which se the first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison (1782-1834), China in 1807. Missionary work in China during the 19th centu was invariably associated with colonialism, even if the forei missionaries were a decidedly mixed lot in every way-in social and educational background, in temperament and disposition, in attitude to their calling, in approach to their objectives...the missionary movement of the 19th century was a complex historical process forming an integral part of the wider world process of 'Europeanisation'.... The European sense of superiority, fed by a growing industrial and technological pre-eminence, was to become dominant; attitudes of compromise, conciliation or cultural sympathy were to become correspondingly more difficult to maintain....[T]he new colonial-imperial age, more direct in the pursuit of its interests, concerned less with cultural reconciliation or adaptation than with command and control, less with the means than with the end.... that sense of superiority-cultural and religious as well as scientific and technical superiority which was to characterise the general European attitude to Asia in the 19th century. [1]