Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700-1914

Andrew Porter is a historian of the British Empire, and this Manchester University Press book is his scholarly study of British Protestant missionary activity and its relationship to overseas imperial expansion between 1700 and 1914. Its strength is that Porter examines the actual, often uneasy relationship between missionaries and imperial authorities in documented historical detail, complicating the simpler popular assumption that missionary work and empire were straightforwardly aligned. Its limit is that it focuses on British Protestant missions specifically within this period, so a claim about Catholic missionary activity, or about missions from a different colonial power, needs a source matched to that separate context.