The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, by Brian Stanley

Abstract

Once upon a time the history of modern western Christian missions seemed to be left largely to retired missionaries, with those trained in the secular academy all too often making do with whatever caricature of mission work best suited their analysis of western imperial history: missionaries were effectively collaborators, and as such were either educating, medicating humanitarians, or the portly, philistine defamers of non-western cultures beloved of nineteenth-century newspaper cartoonists. Since the 1990s, however, a renewed interest in religion and inter-religious encounter—as a consequence of its unexpected cultural longevity, its role in recent acts of war, terrorism, and criminality (whether as motivating force or rhetorical cover), and the steady rise of Christianity in parts of Africa and Asia—has tempted increasing numbers of scholars into mission archives across Europe, North America, and beyond. Here they find accounts of countries and cultures as diverse as Japan, India, and Uganda, often so closely observed and densely detailed that they far surpass government records, élite diaries and the like, in documenting the encounter of the post-Enlightenment West with the cultures of the Global South. This is largely because, to an extent greater than we might care to acknowledge, many missionaries were asking questions about the inner workings of local societies strikingly similar to those that now preoccupy historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.