Professor Heather Sharkey presents here a selection of essays drawn from a conference on “Christian Missions and National Identities,” held at her home institution, the University of Pennsylvania. They represent critical thought and research in a field she has done much to help advance: the social history of Christian missions. As colonial and post-colonial studies develop and mature, at least some of their practitioners are discovering the dynamic roles that religious agents and institutions played in these dramas. And the more one investigates the role of Christian missions, the more complex and interesting the questions become. Who is a missionary? What does it mean to be converted? What kinds of social, economic and political changes did missions set in motion? What happens to the religious ecology of a region when a new religion is introduced? Where does one look for sources to answer these questions?

The essays in this book amply illustrate the richness of this field of inquiry. Chandra Mallampalli focuses on a court case in India in the 1860s, in which relatives contested the estate of an Indian businessman who was a convert to Christianity. The case hinged on whether this convert and the larger community of Christians practiced a western, Christian form of family life and customs of inheritance, or whether Hindu norms and patterns persisted. One could not ask for a more exhaustive examination of what it meant, in daily practice, to be an Indian Christian than what Mallampalli found in the court transcripts and in the public press.

What forces were set loose by the presence of Christianity and Christian agencies in places where it did not exist before? Here too we have some intriguing glimpses, notably one provided by Stephen Berkwitz, who presents several Buddhist polemical and practical responses to Christian missions in Sri Lanka. With a religious and social competitor in town, Buddhist leaders scrambled to respond, both via some contemptuous critiques of the new religion and with a reformist movement that introduced some novel, “Protestantizing” features, such as new preaching on moral self-restraint and new agencies to serve the poor.

As several authors argue, social and political forces set in motion by missions many decades ago emerge powerfully in recent times. Beth Baron shows how a scandalous incident at a Swedish evangelical orphanage in Port Said, Egypt, in the 1930s strengthened the hand of local Islamist revivalists and anti-colonials. Out of this cauldron arose the Muslim Brotherhood. And David Gordon recounts the emergence in the 1930s of an African independent revivalist movement, the Bamuchape, who preached deliverance from witchcraft and opposed the worldliness of mission church Zambians. This intra-Christian conflict eventually dominated the national stage when Kenneth Kaunda, a son of mission church elites and founding president of the nation, was ousted in the 1991 elections by Frederick Chiluba, a Pentecostal populist.

Sharkey states that this book is very much in the mode of post-colonial studies. The most evident trait of that field in these essays is their emphasis on local agency, even in the face of overwhelming disparity of power. African or Asian Christians accepted and lived out their newfound faith on rather different terms than did their missionary docents. Traditional elites responded to Christian interventions with a wide array of counter-measures. Some vigorously resisted and looked for opportunities to discredit these new rivals. Others stole pages from the missionaries' playbooks in order to modernize and revive their own social and religious institutions. But many also made room for the newcomers and their neighbors who converted, hoping to benefit from the new services on offer. And these varied reactions had the potential, it seemed, to perplex and frustrate the colonial powers in many regions. If only the missionaries would just leave well enough alone!

Given the dramatic and often deeply painful social and political struggles that this book portrays, it is difficult to understand how so many colonial and post-colonial studies can ignore religious dynamics. Perhaps at last the tide is turning. It may well be that the latest of the “unexpected consequences of Christian missionary encounters in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia” will be that historical and cultural studies of those regions are taking the religion factor more seriously.