leaving for India. The lady said, “yours is the Quixotism of religion, and I
almost believe you are going in search of the ten lost tribes of Israel.”^10
Her comment revealed the irony of theromantic period concerning the
lost tribes, but Heber himself was atrue believer. “Your joke may have
truth in it,” he replied, open to the possibility that he would find the ten
tribes there. The tribes existed at the margins of fact and fancy, with just
enough possibility of the former remaining to make them of ongoing
interest. And in missionary activity, particularly, the frame of a global
empire widened the scope of possibilities.
Only ten years earlier, the Reverend Claudius Buchanan ( 1766 – 1815 ), a
Scottish missionary appointed to a chaplaincy in Calcutta, declared that he
had found evidence of the tribes’ residence in India or in neighboring
Afghanistan: “we have reason to believe that the Ten Tribes so long lost
if they exist in a body at all have at length been found.”^11 Just as earlier
seekers preceded or followed the imperial expansions in the Americas, in the
British imperial context they accompanied expansion in Afghanistan, India,
and Africa. Indeed, it is often forgotten that David Livingstone ( 1813 – 1873 ),
the great Scottish explorer of Africa and anational hero, was a missionary
who did not distinguish among “Christianity, Commerce, and Civiliza-
tion.”^12 Though he despised ten tribes seekers, he was wedded to them
by his context, a fusion of Christianity, commerce, and civilization: in
short, empire.
Heber and Buchanan epitomize the genre of imperial travelers most
concerned with the ten tribes—the missionary on a mission of conversion.
In this context, even if the expeditionwas not specifically designated as a
search for the ten lost tribes, they always lurked in the background as a
possibility. One could hope, in Ezekiel’s words, to “take the children of
Israel from among the heathen.” As Thorowgood had put it centuries
earlier, the conversion of indigenous peoples might actually be the restora-
tion of the ten lost tribes. The nineteenth century provided plenty of
opportunity for such missionaries/travelers to discover, convert, and restore,
and the empire—specifically, imperial expansion—enabled it. Even though
India, writ large, had been considered the place of the ten tribes since
Roman times, it only became a majorsite for searches during the times
of British colonization.^13 The British Empire and its fringes—indeed,
potentially, the entire globe—had become the zone and the economic
force that sustained interest in the ten tribes and presented the possibility
of finding them. The search for the tribes had come, to an extent, full circle.
Alongside British imperialexpansion, its epicenter had returned to Africa
and Asia.
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