The Missionary Impulse in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800: Or How Protestants Learned to be Missionaries

Advocates of European expansion often justified their acquisition of territories in terms of the imperative to spread Christianity to non-believers. While Iberian Catholics converted large numbers of native Americans and later Africans imported as slaves within their New World colonies, Protestant colonizers were relatively slow to embrace the missionary imperative. This essay seeks to explain why that was the case, and to do so by considering doctrinal, institutional and political impediments. It shows how Protestants did finally put missions not only to their fellow Europeans but also to Native Americans and to slaves at the center of their imperial project.