The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700

Abstract

The history of modern Christian missionary work has only comparatively recently emerged from historiographical obscurity, where it once lingered as an outpost of ecclesiastical history or as a hagiographical genre for popular consumption and edification. A major reason for this change has been awareness of the value of the voluminous collections of mission archives in Europe, Britain and North America to historians of empire. They offer profound insights into imperial culture and attitudes; the stresses between imperial authorities and missionaries; and tensions among missionaries themselves, as well as the complex relations between missionaries and their converts, indigenous employees and associates, and with the wider cultural worlds of Asia, Africa and the South Pacific. Several scholars have been pioneers in alerting the profession to the value of these archives and to the evidence they provide when used with discrimination. Among them is Jeffrey Cox, Professor of History at the University of Iowa. The current work builds on two of his earlier ones—on the English churches in a secular society, and on Christianity and colonial power in India. One of its great strengths is that it embeds the missionary movement in the domestic religious life of imperial Britain and changes within it, as well as drawing on substantial knowledge of a missionary movement in Asia.