The Church Missionary Society (now renamed the Church Mission Society) has been for most of its 200-year history the largest and most influential of the British Protestant missionary agencies. Its bicentenary in 1999 is being marked by the publication of this collection of historical and theological essays by an international team of scholars, including Lamin Sanneh, Kenneth Cragg, and Geoffrey A. Oddie. The volume contains re-assessments of the classic centenary history of the CMS by Eugene Stock and of the strategic vision of Henry Venn, one of the two architects of the Three-Self theory of the indigenous church. There are chapters on the close links between the CMS and the Basel Mission, women missionaries, and regional studies of Samuel Crowther and the Niger mission, Iran, the Middle East, New Zealand, India, and Kikuyu Christianity. The volume makes a major contribution to the growing body of literature on the indigenization of missionary traditions, and will be of interest to historians of the missionary movement and non-western Christianity, as well as theologians concerned with religious pluralism, dialogue, and Christian mission.

Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and less-explored sources of information (such as folklore, oral traditions, songs and proverbs, life histories collected by missionaries and colonial officials, correspondence in Arabic, and consular and admiralty interviews with runaway slaves). Each source has a short introduction highlighting its significance and orienting the reader. This first of two volumes provides students and scholars with a trove of African sources for studying African slavery and the slave trade.