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The Methodists of settler colonialism: Claire Blencowe, Spirits of extraction: Christianity, settler colonialism and the geology of race, Manchester University Press, 2025

07Apr25

Description: Spirits of Extraction explores the civilisational metaphysics of race, which emerged with the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, and helped to secure (settler) colonial sovereignty especially in the nineteenth century. Following the Methodist movement, the book traces a route from the evangelical awakening in eighteenth-century Bristol through the Methodist revivals of the Cornish mining diaspora in the nineteenth-century British Empire, through to the contested lives and lands of Anishinaabewaki / Upper Canada wherein Methodist missions and other evangelicals helped to secure the colonial extraction of copper, as well as territorial control, not least through the inscription of abuse in residential Indian schools. The book contributes to biopolitical theory by developing an original and nuanced case study of Christian religious biopolitics and the civilisational metaphysics of race. Highlighting the theme of exorcism and the role of wounding in the pursuit of ‘truly Christian life’, it adds to understanding of how biopolitical care for life enables and encourages racialised abuse. Expanding on Kathryn Yusoff’s analysis of the geology of race, the book also contributes to planetary social theory and geophilosphy, arguing that Methodism became a resonance machine for the quasi-divine claims of extractive industries. The civilisational metaphysics of race secures the race hierarchies that are essential technologies for extractive industries. At the same time evangelical experiences of salvation, exorcism and the affirmative spiral or faith engendered in modern Christianity became enmeshed with geological consciousness and the culture of the extractive industries, helping to establish their claim to manifest quasi-divine redemptive power.


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