During the mid-century wave of decolonization, the ecumenical movement sought to dissociate Christianity from its role – real and perceived – as a handmaiden of empire. At the same time, the WCC and IMC sought to anchor Christianity in the constitutions of postcolonial states, in order to secure the religious freedom of missionaries and Christian minorities, especially in majority-Muslim countries. Ecumenical advocacy thus sought to enshrine the international norm they had shaped in the Universal Declaration’s Article 18 in domestic law. After discussing the wider trajectory of the ecumenical movement in relation to empire, this chapter turns to two important cases: Indonesia and (Northern) Nigeria. In each case, the ecumenical movement successfully influenced the drafting of postcolonial constitutions, using the language of human rights to claim impartiality while enhancing Christianity’s position vis-à-vis Islam. In doing so, ecumenists drew on their ties to departing colonial powers, the influence of those missionaries and Christian minorities that remained, and postcolonial leaders’ desire to establish essentially secular states.

Chapter 2 describes the history of archaeological research on the plateau, beginning with the efforts of missionaries, diplomats, and explorers to compile natural histories of the plateau, then moving to 20th-century research conducted by Chinese and Western scholars.

This chapter introduces students of US foreign relations to the methods of studying religion in US diplomatic history. The challenges in thinking about (and with) religion might be divided into three general issues: how to understand the relationship between religion and historical causality; how to make sense of the ways that religion is embedded in supposedly secular forms and institutions; and, perhaps most importantly, how to define religion. Making sense of religion demands attention to all these issues, as well as a willingness to engage with nonstate actors and ideology. Perhaps most importantly, it demands diplomatic historians take seriously the religious language, institutions, and behaviors they encounter in the archive. After a brief historiographical overview of the religious turn in diplomatic history and the global turn in religious history, the chapter focuses on the key themes of secularism, humanitarianism, causality, and mapping. It ends with a discussion of how attention to religious studies scholarship can help attune diplomatic historians to new dimensions in our traditional archives.

After a successful fundraising campaign, the Church of Christ missionaries arrived in Italy in early 1949. They acquired a villa in Frascati, in the Castelli Romani area southeast of Rome, where they established a school and an orphanage and launched an ambitious missionary effort. Their activities quickly alarmed the local Catholic clergy and Vatican hierarchies, who viewed the mission as part of a broader Protestant strategy to undermine the Catholic Church’s near monopoly on religion in Italy. The Vatican promptly urged the Italian government to take action, relying on Fascist-era laws to curb the missionaries' activities. The Italian Ministry of the Interior, led by the conservative Christian Democrat Mario Scelba, targeted the Texas evangelicals for overstaying their short-term tourist visas and for opening a school without the requisite authorizations. Efforts to spread their message in various towns of the Castelli Romani were met with significant resistance, including violent attacks by locals. As tensions escalated, the missionaries grew increasingly frustrated with what they perceived as the indifference of US diplomats stationed in Rome. They began lobbying their congressional representatives in Washington, and soon members of Congress took up their cause, pressuring the State Department to intervene.

Chapter 2 traces the growing sentimentalization of the Indian ayah in nineteenth-century British imagination. Mrs. Sherwood’s relationship with her Indian maidservants is explored through her voluminous missionary writings, which reveal the role of Christianity in shaping mistress–maid relations in the British Empire. The chapter then explores why, during moments of colonial violence, such as the 1806 Vellore Mutiny and particularly the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the Indian ayah’s fidelity to the white family became so important in British imperial imagination. In British visual and literary culture, particularly in missionary literature, the Indian ayah’s loyalty morally legitimized British colonial rule during the turbulence of Indian rebellions and later Indian anti-colonial nationalism. The period of growing sentimentalization of the ayah, however, was also a period of growing legal precarity for ayahs, with the relaxation of older legal paternalism and the disappearance of earlier gendered legal sympathy towards ayahs. Exploring cases of individual ayahs from legal archives, this chapter argues that the cultural veneration of the ayah’s fidelity concealed the vulnerability of real-life ayahs.

Ayahs provided care labor to British families on the transoceanic voyages between India and Britain. In British cultural representations, mobility endowed ayahs with wealth and agency. This chapter, by contrast, argues that the lives of peripatetic ayahs were quite precarious; they had no legal protection from abuse and abandonment. While the East India Company had instituted a bond system for the repatriation of ayahs to India, the British state from 1858 formulated the domestic labor of ayahs as a “private” issue beyond state intervention, thereby upholding the privileges of British employers and providing no solution for the abandonment of ayahs in Britain. An Ayahs’ Home was set up in London, providing boarding for ayahs and allowing London missionaries the opportunity to proselytize the captive group of “heathen” women. Using petitions by ayahs, vernacular sources, newspapers, and documents from the Ayahs’ Home and the India Office in London, this chapter highlights the experiences of traveling ayahs from ship voyages to London courtrooms, their gendered attempts to preserve their caste purity – deemed lost for crossing the ocean – and their desperate attempts to return home to India.

Anglican missionaries took advantage of the spread of the empire to prosleytise to Native Americans and African Americans. Motivated by a desire to bring the gospel to so-called heathens and halt the spread of Catholicism, Cambridge men travelled to North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India to spread Protestantism. If they chose not to head abroad, they instead provided donations to missionary organisations, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, or assisted in the administration of plantations owned by these organisations. As Cambridge missionaries and dergymen encountered enslavement, prominent University figures became increasingly interested in debates concerning and morality the efficacy of Indigenous and African slavery. Some fellows were actively sceptical of the moral grounds for slavery, whilst others believed that enslavement was grounded in Christian belief. Rather than emerging in the era of abolition, scepticism and debate about the moral foundations of enslavement were consistent features of British intellectual life for over a century.

Following the abolition of the slave trade, Cambridge men turned their intellectual attentions to the institution of slavery as a whole. Nevertheless, students, alumni, and fellows were torn on how best to create an empire of free labour and on the prospects for freed people of colour in post-emancipation societies. The early nineteenth century was a colorful era of experimentation as Cambridge activists sought to gradually achieve abolition without precipitating the violence and rebellion that characterized the Haitian Revolution, whilst Black and radical white abolitionists advocated for an immediate end to racial slavery. Historians have long ignored this phase of Cambridge debate on enslavement post-1807, which has resulted in a historiography of Cambridge abolitionism which overemphasizes its radical nature. In reality, a growing conservatism dominated this period of abolitionist thought at Cambridge – particularly as some Cambridge fellows and alumni continued to eschew pro-slavery rhetoric.

Africa is a linguistically diverse continent, hosting between 1,250 and 2,100 languages. Some of the prominent languages include Swahili, Hausa, Lingala, Amharic, Yoruba, Oromo, Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho. Lexicography in African languages has been shaped by colonialism and subsequent language politics. Pioneer dictionaries were compiled by European prospectors, missionaries, and colonial administrators, primarily for their own use as they needed to learn African languages and communicate with local communities. While those early dictionaries made landmark contributions toward the development of African languages and some of them remain useful even today, they often failed to accurately represent African languages’ linguistic, cultural, and religious systems. Mother-tongue speakers of African languages started to drive internally motivated lexicographic projects in the twentieth century, prioritizing mother-tongue speakers as target users. Dictionaries began to occupy a prominent position in the development of African languages. This has resulted in some governments such as in South Africa investing in dictionary-making and universities offering academic and professional lexicographic training.

The wide-ranging conversation in this chapter between Ilan Stavans and Mark Turin terminological and definitional questions – such as what and who is Indigenous – the status and importance of linguistic diversity in North America and South Asia, and the role of missionaries in early dictionary work. Turin and Stavans discuss complex questions of colonialism, migration and settlement, Indigenous sovereignty in language work, and the powerful space that dictionaries occupy in language reclamation and revitalization projects. Turin offers ethnographic examples and cultural vignettes from his three decades of collaborative work with the Thangmi-speaking community of eastern Nepal, whose Indigenous Tibeto-Burman language he documented and for which he helped develop an orthography.

This chapter sees Edgar in peak career, a seasoned director and company secretary, but with continuing financial anxieties and resentments against his employer as he approached retirement. His last two years in Baghdad, in company with Winifred, illustrate the close relationship of the British imperial administration with Middle East shipping companies, and Edgar’s role in both. Winifred fostered the development of the Baghdad Anglican church, mainly for expatriates, and missionary activity, extending her St Albans church work. For Edgar, as for Winifred, their subsequent decade in the 1930s in St Albans before retirement offers a case study in expatriate transition to life at ‘home’, to domesticity and engagement in public life and local society, along with lingering Persian associations and nostalgia for their expatriate past. While expatriate service succeeded in cementing their class transformation, they remained vulnerable to middle-class economic austerity which characterised peacetime 1930s and wartime 1940s. The Wilsons’ longed-for stable settlement in England contrasted with the adoption of expatriate careers by all their children, with daughters as overseas missionaries and sons as overseas mining engineers, a tension between the continuation and rejection of expatriate mobility concluded in the next chapter.

This chapter explores the spread of Christianity in Late Antiquity, focusing on archaeological evidence and methodological challenges in tracing its expansion. It examines how Christianity transitioned from a marginalised faith to an institutionalised religion, emphasising regional differences in its adoption across the Mediterranean and beyond. The chapter discusses a variety of materials, including early Christian inscriptions, artefacts, funerary practices and architectural remains such as churches, baptisteries and monasteries. Sites like the house church at Dura Europos and early Christian catacombs provide crucial insights into the religion’s early development. The study also highlights the role of missionary activity and the influence of state policies, particularly after Constantine’s legalisation of Christianity in the fourth century. A major argument is that Christianity spread unevenly, with urban centres adopting it earlier than rural areas. The transition was not uniform, as some regions experienced periods of resistance or syncretism with existing religious traditions. The chapter underscores the difficulty of identifying Christian material culture due to the overlap with pagan symbols. The chapter rounds off by calling for a more critical approach to interpreting archaeological evidence and suggests that future research should focus on regional case studies to refine our understanding of Christianity’s complex expansion.

The seventeenth century saw the development of increasingly centralised polities in northern and eastern Europe that sought to normalise the religious status of their unchristianised minorities. A new kind of antiquarian curiosity about unchristianised peoples was shown by figures such as Johannes Schefferus, although ethnographic study often went hand in hand with campaigns of conversion and confiscation of sacred objects (like Sami rune drums). At the same time, anxieties about witchcraft were sometimes brought to bear on unchristianised peoples as idolaters potentially in league with the devil - although attitudes varied greatly from region to region. This chapter explores the impact of colonial expansion on Europe’s unchristianised minority and the role of missionaries, antiquarians, witch-hunters, and ethnographers in redefining the ‘pagan’ threat.

Chapter 6 traces how, in the aftermath of these reforms, the Neogranadian church, at the parish level, became an Indigenous and grassroots organisation. One aspect of this transformation was institutional, as it came to be better staffed, organised, and equipped. Another was ideological, as the lessons of the Jesuit experiments with missionary methods were extended across the archdiocese, centring everyday practice, popular devotion, and social institutions. But the most significant aspect was led by Indigenous people themselves, as the shift away from punitive policies and towards a more inclusive Christianisation, coupled with the implementation of a more effective language policy, created space and opportunities for people in rural parishes to interact with Christianity in new ways. This went much further than the authorities had intended, as they learned when they sought to rein in some of these changes, and it transformed the New Kingdom of Granada forever.