The explosive expansion of Christianity in Africa and Asia during the last two centuries constitutes one of the most remarkable cultural transformations in the history of mankind. Because it coincided with the spread of European economic and political hegemony, it tends to be taken for granted that Christian missions went hand in hand with imperialism and colonial conquest. In this book historians survey the relationship between Christian missions and the British Empire from the seventeenth century to the 1960s and treat the subject thematically, rather than regionally or chronologically. Many of these themes are treated at length for the first time, relating the work of missions to language, medicine, anthropology, and decolonization. Other important chapters focus on the difficult relationship between missionaries and white settlers, women and mission, and the neglected role of the indigenous evangelists who did far more than European or North American missionaries to spread the Christian religion - belying the image of Christianity as the 'white man's religion'.

Introduction
1. Prelude: The Christianizing of British America
2. Missionaries and Empire: An Overview 1700-1914
3. Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century
4. Where the Missionary Frontier Ran Ahead of Empire
5. Christian Missions and the Raj
6. New Christians as Evangelists
7. 'Trained to Tell the Truth': Missionaries, Converts, and Narration
8. Women and Cultural Exchanges
9. Language
10. New Religious Movements
11. Anthropology
12. Education and Medicine
13. Decolonization