In November 1701, David van Nyendael, an envoy of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) was the first European to visit the royal court in Kumasi, capital of the emerging Ashanti empire in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. Three hundred years of Dutch-Ghanaian relations have passed since then. Merchants, missionaries and migrants focuses on various aspects of this long-standing and intricate economic, political and cultural relationship between the Ghanaians and the Dutch.

Lightfoot examines the interactions between Native American communities in California & the earliest colonial settlements, those of Russian pioneers & Franciscan missionaries. He compares the history of the different ventures & their legacies that still help define the political status of native people.

Christians in the West are living among some of the least-reached people groups in the world and have the unprecedented opportunity to share the gospel with them. Here J. D. Payne introduces the phenomenon of human migration to the West and discusses how the Western church ought to respond.

A magisterial sweep through 1500 years of Christian history with a groundbreaking focus on the missionary role of migrants in its spread. Human migration has long been identified as a driving force of historical change. Building on this understanding, Jehu Hanciles surveys the history of Christianity’s global expansion from its origins through 1500 CE to show how migration—more than official missionary activity or imperial designs—played a vital role in making Christianity the world’s largest religion. Church history has tended to place a premium on political power and institutional forms, thus portraying Christianity as a religion disseminated through official representatives of church and state. But, as Hanciles illustrates, this “top-down perspective overlooks the multifarious array of social movements, cultural processes, ordinary experiences, and non-elite activities and decisions that contribute immensely to religious encounter and exchange.” Hanciles’s socio-historical approach to understanding the growth of Christianity as a world religion disrupts the narrative of Western preeminence, while honoring and making sense of the diversity of religious expression that has characterized the world Christian movement for two millennia. In turning the focus of the story away from powerful empires and heroic missionaries, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity instead tells the more truthful story of how every Christian migrant is a vessel for the spread of the Christian faith in our deeply interconnected world.

The Missionary’s Curse tells the story of a Chinese village that has been Catholic since the seventeenth century, drawing direct connections between its history, the globalizing church, and the nation. Harrison recounts the popular folk tales of merchants and peasants who once adopted Catholic rituals and teachings for their own purposes, only to find themselves in conflict with the orthodoxy of Franciscan missionaries arriving from Italy. The village’s long religious history, combined with the similarities between Chinese folk religion and Italian Catholicism, forces us to rethink the extreme violence committed in the area during the Boxer Uprising. The author also follows nineteenth century Chinese priests who campaigned against missionary control, up through the founding of the official church by the Communist Party in the 1950s. Harrison’s in-depth study provides a rare insight into villager experiences during the Socialist Education Movement and Cultural Revolution, as well as the growth of Christianity in China in recent years. She makes the compelling argument that Catholic practice in the village, rather than adopting Chinese forms in a gradual process of acculturation, has in fact become increasingly similar to those of Catholics in other parts of the world.

Trade and Finance in Global Missions (16th-18th Centuries) is a collection of articles analysing the interplay between economic and Catholic missions in the early modern period and in the global context of Christian expansion.

This volume explores Chinese religions on a global stage so as to challenge the traditional dichotomy of the western global and the Chinese local, and to add a new perspective for understanding religious modernity globally. Contributors from four different continents aim at applying a social scientific approach to systematically researching the globalization of Chinese religions.