This book examines the changing landscape of evangelical British missionary education in the British Empire of the nineteenth century. It argues that over the course of the nineteenth century many aspects of mission schools were secularised, leading missionary societies to question the ambivalent legacy of mission schools.

Introduction: entangled histories of missionary education 1 ‘Liberal and comprehensive’ education: the Negro Education Grant and Nonconforming missionary societies in the 1830s2 ‘The blessings of civilization’: the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements)3 Female education and the Liverpool Missionary Conference of 18604 Sustaining and secularising mission schools 5 Missionary lessons for Secular States: the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, 1910 ConclusionBibliographyIndex

The nineteenth century saw dramatic change in the self-assumed role of evangelical Protestant mission schools as one of the primary institutions of moral reform in the nineteenth-century British colonial world. Drawing on key moments in the development of missionary education from the 1830s to the beginning of the twentieth century, this study examines the changing ideologies behind establishing mission schools and the provision of ‘liberal and comprehensive’ education in shaping non-Europeans into ‘useful’ and ‘modern’ members of empire. It examines the Negro Education Grant in the West Indies, the Aborigines Select Committee (British settlements), and missionary conferences as well as drawing on local voices and contexts from Southern Africa, British India and Sri Lanka to demonstrate the changing expectations for, engagement with, and ideologies circulating around mission schools resulting from government policies and local responses. By the turn of the twentieth century, many colonial governments had encroached upon missionary schooling to such an extent that the symbiosis that had allowed missionary groups autonomy at the beginning of the century had morphed into an entanglement that secularised mission schools. The spread of ‘Western modernity’ through mission schools in British colonies impacted upon local cultures and societies. It also threatened Christian religious moral authority, leading missionary societies by the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 to question the ambivalent legacy of missionary schooling and to fear for the morality and religious sensibilities of their pupils and indeed for morality within Britain and the Empire.This book will interest scholars of empire, race, education and religion.

'Missionaries and Modernity is an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning fields of mission studies, education, and humanitarianism, and should be a key assigned reading for numerous graduate courses as well as a discursive linchpin for any further discussion of imperialism, mission education, and competing definitions of “modernity” and subjecthood.'Journal of Moravian History, Volume 23, Number 2, 2023, pp. 157-160'This book is a must for any scholar wishing to study empire and the missionary dynamic that operated within it.'International Journal for Indian Studies, Volume 8, Issue 2. December 2023, pp. 116-117