This collection of essays looks at missions, their complicity in European colonialism, and their postcolonial aftermath. It examines the spread of Christianity, ranging over the anthropological, textual, historical, and geographical dimensions of mission enterprises, with topics as diverse as the influence of mission printing and record-keeping on traditional life in Africa to the role of missions in changing styles of dress in India. Also, uniquely, the collection includes essays analyzing the role of proselytizing in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as American liberal democratic capitalism. The volume is interdisciplinary, focusing on textual and material aspects of missions. Like Griffiths' earlier ground-breaking books in postcolonial studies, and Scott's well-known interdisciplinary work on missions and postcolonial literatures, this collection will be fascinating to scholars in postcolonial/cultural and mission studies and be useful as a teaching tool as well. Mixed Messages was listed among the 15 best books for 2005 in the Jan 2006 issue of The International Bulletin of Mission Studies .

This collection of essays looks at missions, their complicity in European colonialism, and their postcolonial aftermath. It examines the spread of Christianity, ranging over the anthropological, textual, historical, and geographical dimensions of mission enterprises, with topics as diverse as the influence of mission printing and record-keeping on traditional life in Africa to the role of missions in changing styles of dress in India. Also, uniquely, the collection includes essays analyzing the role of proselytizing in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as American liberal democratic capitalism. The volume is interdisciplinary, focusing on textual and material aspects of missions. Like Griffiths' earlier ground-breaking books in postcolonial studies, and Scott's well-known interdisciplinary work on missions and postcolonial literatures, this collection will be fascinating to scholars in postcolonial/cultural and mission studies and be useful as a teaching tool as well. Mixed Messages was listed among the 15 best books for 2005 in the Jan 2006 issue of The International Bulletin of Mission Studies .

Presents fresh insights into the relationships between missions and indigenous peoples, and the outcomes of mission activities in the processes of imperial conquest and colonisation. This book focuses on missions across the British Empire (including India, Africa, Asia, the Pacific), within transnational and comparative perspectives.

As a religious and social phenomenon Methodism engages with a number of disciplines including history, sociology, gender studies and theology. Methodist energy and vitality have intrigued, and continue to fascinate scholars. This Companion brings together a team of respected international scholars writing on key themes in World Methodism to produce an authoritative and state-of-the-art review of current scholarship, mapping the territory for future research. Leading scholars examine a range of themes including: the origins and genesis of Methodism; the role and significance of John Wesley; Methodism’s emergence within the international and transatlantic evangelical revival of the Eighteenth-Century; the evolution and growth of Methodism as a separate denomination in Britain; its expansion and influence in the early years of the United States of America; Methodists’ roles in a range of philanthropic and social movements including the abolition of slavery, education and temperance; the character of Methodism as both conservative and radical; its growth in other cultures and societies; the role of women as leaders in Methodism, both acknowledged and resisted; the worldwide spread of Methodism and its enculturation in America, Asia and Africa; the development of distinctive Methodist theologies in the last three centuries; its role as a progenitor of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, and the engagement of Methodists with other denominations and faiths across the world. This major companion presents an invaluable resource for scholars worldwide; particularly those in the UK, North America, Asia and Latin America.

Focusing on the six decades that German Moravian missionaries worked in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, this book enriches understanding of colonial politics and the role of the non-British other in manipulating practice and policy in foreign realms. Central to the transnational nature of the book are questions of identity and of how individuals, and the organisations they worked for, can be seen as both colluders and opposers within nation-state borders and politics. It analyses the ways in which the Moravian missionaries navigated competing agendas within the colonial setting, especially those that impacted on their sense of personal vocation, their practices of conversion, and their understandings of the indigenous non-Christian peoples in the settler society of Victoria.

Christhu Doss examines how the colonial construct of communalism through the fault lines of the supposed religious neutrality, the hunger for the bread of life, the establishment of exclusive village settlements for the proselytes, the rhetoric of Victorian morality, the booby-traps of modernity, and the subversion of Indian cultural heritage resulted in a radical reorientation of religious allegiance that eventually created a perpetual detachment between proselytes and the “others.” Exploring the trajectories of communalism, Doss demonstrates how the multicultural Indian society, known widely for its composite culture, and secular convictions were categorized, compartmentalized, and communalized by the racialized religious pretensions. A vital read for historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and all those who are interested in religions, cultures, identity politics, and decolonization in modern India.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of pupils attended boarding schools in various places across the globe. Their experiences were vastly different, yet they all had in common that they were separated from their families and childhood friends for a period of time in order to sleep, eat, learn and move within the limited spatial sites of the boarding school. This book frames these ‘boarding schools’ as a global and transcultural phenomenon that is part of larger political and social developments of European imperialism, the Cold War, and independence movements. Drawing together case studies from colonial South Africa, colonial India, Dutch Indonesia, early twentieth-century Nigeria, Fascist Spain, Ghana, Nazi Germany, nineteenth-century Ireland, North America and the Soviet Union, this edited collection examines the ways in which boarding schools extracted pupils from their original social background in order to train, mold and shape them so that they could fit into the perceived position in broader society. The book makes the broader argument that framing boarding schools as a global phenomenon is imperative for a deepened understanding of the global and transnational networks that linked people as well as ideas and practices of education and childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.