Translating God on the Borders of Sovereignty

Over the long nineteenth century, translations of Christian scripture into indigenous languages were produced at a far greater rate than at any time previously, a product of both the rise of the modern Protestant missionary movement and the acceleration of British imperial and Anglo settler colonial conquest. This article explores a dimension of the global evangelical translation project: the translation of the word "God. " Where, at the close of the sixteenth century, there were just under 30 different words used to translate "God " in published vernacular, between 1800 and the early twentieth century close to 400 new "Gods " entered the Christian lexicon. Reading translation conflicts for what they tell us about the way power was imagined on the modern Anglo-American colonial frontier, this article argues that contests over the translation of "God " offer a window into the cultural and intellectual dimension of colonial conflict, and reveal a neglected chapter in the conceptual history of sovereignty: at the very moment when the concept of sovereignty was increasingly imagined on the model of the law-bound territorial state, alternative theories of sovereign power entered global circulation.