Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853

Blood Ground traces the transition from religion to race as the basis for policing the boundaries of the "white" community. Elbourne suggests broader shifts in the relationship of missions to colonialism – as the British movement became less internationalist, more respectable, and more emblematic of the British imperial project – and shows that it is symptomatic that many Christian Khoekhoe ultimately rebelled against the colony. Missionaries across the white settler empire brokered bargains – rights in exchange for cultural change, for example – that brought aboriginal peoples within the aegis of empire but, ultimately, were only partially and ambiguously fulfilled.