This is an ambitious work that uses a transnational framework to examine how missionaries navigated the shifting and increasingly secular landscape of empire from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. It examines the intersection of missionary education with government policies, local responses and broader ideological currents, arguing that missionary education was both a product and driver of these interactions. Jensz builds on Kirsten Kamphuis and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk’s (2020) framework for studying colonial education by avoiding a strictly religious or secular perspective. Instead, Jensz’s work examines the interplay between missionaries of different denominations, government institutions and local communities. This reveals the complexities and commonalities within spaces of missionary education, marking an important contribution to the study of missionaries and empire.

The central argument of Missionaries and modernity lies in an analysis of the tensions between ‘colonial modernity’ and ‘missionary modernity’. While both frameworks were complicit in promoting ideals of ‘civilisation’ in non-European peoples, Jensz distinguishes between the two by their underlying principles and goals. Unlike colonial modernity, missionary modernity included concepts such as the ‘economic independence of individuals through their own labours, universal education and female emancipation from traditional roles’, alongside rejecting ‘heathen’ religions, and embracing Christian morality (p. 2). Colonial modernity, by contrast, sought to integrate and assimilate non-Europeans into the empire as political subjects. Jensz argues that missionary schooling became the primary vehicle for advancing missionary modernity, allowing missionary societies to justify their own existence and relevance in a time of increasing secularisation and governmental intervention. Through this lens, Jensz situates missionary education within ‘networks and circuits of empire’ (p. 8), a critical intervention in scholarship.

Jensz’s transnational framework is anchored in key moments of policy change, with each of five chapters exploring a specific case study that illustrates the evolving expectations for and engagement with mission schools over time. Jensz, whilst recognising that case studies can sometimes reduce sites and places as homogenous, selected these snapshots to represent intersections between missionaries, government organisations and parliamentary actions, including both calls to action and reflective moments. The book is organised according to three overarching themes: organisation and actors, ideologies and discourses, and spaces. She draws upon an impressive source base that includes missionary correspondence, missionary periodicals, conference reports, colonial office correspondence and government publications. However, as Jensz acknowledges, the perspectives of those who participated in or were recipients of missionary education are largely absent, a limitation arising from the constraints of the archival material used and the nature of the case study selection.

The opening chapter focuses on the creation of the ‘Negro Education Grant’ in the British West Indies. This detailed account of the grant’s creation is valuable as it has received little attention since Shirley Gordon’s 1958 study. Designed to finance the ‘experiment’ that was the emancipation of enslaved people, the grant sought a ‘liberal and comprehensive’ religious and moral education. By inviting ten missionary societies, both Anglican and Nonconformist, to apply for funding, the grant underscored the practical prioritisation of the functions of education over religious uniformity (p. 45). As Nonconformist missionary societies had now been engaged in public debates on British imperialism, this ‘reverberated within missionary networks in Britain’ (p. 65). Building on this argument, chapter ii explores the intersection of humanitarian and missionary agendas concerning Indigenous people of the British Empire. Jensz explores the ‘porous boundaries’ between humanitarians, who wanted systemic change, and missionaries, who sought to educate individual souls. The chapter’s case study is the 1836–7 Select Committee on Aborigines, during which missionaries provided evidence of the negative impacts of British colonisation and settlers. Missionaries presented evidence on the destructive impacts of empire, arguing that ‘religious instruction and education’ should be supplied to Indigenous people as ‘compensation for their loss of land’ (p. 81). This analysis reveals the tensions between missionary and colonial modernities: whereas ‘religious and moral education’ was promoted for newly freed enslaved people in the British colonies, the new phrasing of ‘religious instruction and education’ marked a subtle but significant shift, separating morality from education.

Chapter iii turns to missionaries in India, examining attitudes toward female education against the backdrop of the 1860 Liverpool Missionary Conference: a forum missionaries used to share their frustrations at the slow progress of their efforts. This conference also provided a space for missionary groups to share information about schooling through a network of knowledge in which ‘concepts of morality and the position of non-Europeans were embedded’ (p.125). The chapter traces a shift in missionary priorities for female education, from moral instruction to practical training. In the mid-century, Christian schooling had focused on morality for women, but it soon became necessary to teach women as potential employees, contributing to new ideas about ‘missionary modernity’. Women were increasingly viewed as pivotal agents of moral and religious transformation, a reflection of the gendered assumption that women are, and represent, the ‘moral compass of society’ (p. 150).

The source base of chapter iv is particularly valuable for its inclusion of autobiographical accounts from Sri Lanka of teachers working in missions who wished to be ordained, providing glimpses into their motivations and experiences. This group of local men has often been overlooked in favour of ordained Christian missionaries. The scarcity of Christian teachers had led missionary societies to hire Buddhist teachers, prioritising modernity rather than morality in their hiring practices. Significantly, Jensz notes that some teachers used their positions to subtly challenge Western knowledge systems, and instilled ‘their pupils with a sense of pride in their Indigenous culture’ (p. 174). This chapter also traces the increasing involvement of colonial governments in overseeing the content of missionary education, as state-administered grants imposed standardised curricula and inspections, contributing to the secularisation of education.

The book concludes with an examination of the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910, a gathering of 1,200 Protestant and Anglican missionaries seeking to address challenges they faced in the period of new imperialism. Jensz contextualises the conference around its 430-page culminating report, Commission III, entitled Education in relation to the Christianisation of national life. Historians have largely neglected this comprehensive recording of missionary activity, and it is used here to highlight the shifting dynamics between missions and governments, the evolving gendered emphasis on adaptive learning in missionary education and concerns that mission education encouraged denationalised locals. Jensz uses this report to highlight the problematic assumptions underpinning missionary education, including the belief that schooling needed to be adapted to suit the presumed lower intellectual and cultural capacities of the missionary’s subjects. The final report for Commission III critiqued missionaries for their limited success, spurring what Jensz terms a ‘crisis of identity’ for missionary societies. Whilst it had become clear that missionary education was no longer needed in all Western education programmes, missionaries turned again to reshaping the imperativeness of Christian moral instruction, a claim, as Missionaries and modernity demonstrates, that had been advanced in various ways since the early nineteenth century.

Overall, Missionaries and modernity is a valuable analysis of how missionaries adapted to an increasingly secularised environment in order to justify their existence. The book provides an impressive survey of key moments in missionary societies’ histories, through carefully selected case studies of policy and conferences, to demonstrate how a ‘missionary modernity’ was sought after, sometimes in polarity with colonial government ideals. It makes a significant contribution to the historiography of missionary education and British imperialism, despite its source base and frame of analysis limiting the exploration of the reception and impact of missionary work across the globe.