John Stuart's British Missionaries and the End of Empire offers a sobering yet enlightening study about the boxes in which British missionaries found themselves progressively confined during the closing decades of British colonial rule in Africa. During the high age of British colonialism (1890–1940), British missions benefitted from the willingness of British colonial governments to both hear and typically support the missions' evangelical agendas. In turn, colonial governments looked to British missions above all others to help implement government schemes for education and social development. In the settler societies that came into existence in east, central, and southern Africa, governments recognized the claims of missions to represent the interest of the African peoples being dominated by white settlers. British missions, in sum, grew comfortable as mediators between the colonial state and conquered African peoples. As Stuart shows, the closing years of World War II saw British missions busily engaged in devising new schemes for the further evangelization of Africa that presumed this mediator status. But as Stuart also demonstrates, the years following the world war brought a series of political crises that cumulatively forced missionaries to realize not only how little store colonial governments set in them as go-betweens, but also that perhaps it was time for them to pass on to Africans the tasks associated with planting Christianity in Africa.

Stuart first relates the story of the London Missionary Society's (LMS) ineffectual effort to broker the fallout following the decision of Seretse Khama, heir to the throne of the Bangwato in Botswana, to marry the white English woman Ruth Williams in 1948. The British Colonial Office decided to deny Seretse his throne and to banish him permanently from his land rather than risk the anger of white settlers in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. The failure of the LMS to convince the British government to reinstate Seretse, combined with the LMS's inability to explain to the people why their ruler was banished, cost the LMS the monopoly it claimed over the practice of Christianity among the Bangwato.

Stuart next considers the battle of British missionaries in British central Africa, lead on one hand by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and on the other by the Church of Scotland mission, to stop the formation of the Central African Federation, a political entity that would combine the settler governments of the three British central Africa colonies (Nyasaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia) into one. Africans were overwhelmingly opposed to the move, which they saw as a scheme to amplify control over African populations by the tiny white minorities that lived in those colonies. One thing that Stuart does a good job of showing is the extent to which, in the aftermath of World War II and through the 1950s, the British government continued to follow an explicitly imperialistic and covertly racist agenda in its African colonies outside of West Africa. To their credit, missions in central Africa made clear to the Colonial Office the depth of African opposition to the Central African Federation. The British government ignored the missions, however, and in supporting the formation of the Central African Federation wagered (wrongly) that the white minorities would find ways to keep the African majorities under control. Again, and even more spectacularly than in Botswana, missions had been left out of a loop they assumed they controlled.

Stuart rightly points out that missions, particularly the CMS, did their best to alleviate the social suffering associated with the Kenyan “Emergency,” of the 1950s, better know in the West as the “Mau Mau Rebellion.” Beginning in the 1940s Kikuyu males in Kenya began to join secret Mau Mau societies, where they swore oaths that they would fight to take back Kikuyu land that had been claimed by European settlers. In an effort to suppress the movement, the colonial government declared such societies illegal in 1950, and when this did not work, in 1952 the government announced a “State of Emergency.” Thousands of Kikuyu males, most famously Jomo Kenyatta, were rounded up and placed in detention camps. In response to these events, missions petitioned British and local authorities to end the Emergency and preached to the men in the camps about the need for the latter to forsake their oaths and turn their paths toward Christianity. In both endeavors the missions were overwhelmed by developments. The State of Emergency in Kenya was the first great line in the sand drawn in defense of settler rule in Africa. It took eight years for the British government and the settlers in Kenya to accept the failure of their cause and declare the Emergency over. Kenyatta was released from prison and soon led Kenya to independence. In the wake of the obvious dismissal by the colonial government of their efforts to mediate and the equally public ineffectiveness of their efforts to evangelize the men in the camps, the missions were left to struggle with the question whether their time in Kenya, and by extension all of Africa, was over.

As Stuart notes in his last major chapter, one reason for mission hesitancy about the future of missions in Africa was the decision of U.S. President John F. Kennedy to establish a secular voluntary service organization, the “Peace Corps,” committed to providing the kinds of social development help that missions had traditionally provided. By that time missions themselves had already experimented with contracting out social services like teaching and nursing to secular workers. The problem was that secular workers could not be depended upon to proselytize.

Perhaps unfairly, the import of the case that Stuart makes is that the missions he studied backed into a commitment to handing over direction of mission-sponsored churches to Africans. As political authority in Britain's former colonies passed from British to African hands, so spiritual authority in British missions likewise passed into African hands. Missionaries wanted to stay on past the end of empire, but they lacked the capacity to do so.