Indians All? Missionary Encounters in the Early Modern Supra-Atlantic

The sudden prominence of Atlantic history has forced historians to examine the vast but interconnected networks of trade and intercultural exchange that characterized the Atlantic littoral.  And yet, as broad as Atlantic history appears, Protestant missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were thinking even more ambitiously.  In fact, some of the first printed accounts of Protestant missionary activity (headed by Dutch Calvinist preachers) come from Southern Asia, not New England.  Thus, when English Protestant missionaries began evangelical enterprises among blacks and Indians in the Americas during the middle of the seventeenth century, the Asian model of missionary activity loomed large in their thinking about policy and strategy.  It is therefore impossible to understand early American missions without considering the ways in which past evangelical enterprises by Dutch and German preachers in Asia served as comparative models that reified distinctions between American and Asian mission fields while simultaneously highlighting their comparisons and entanglements.  That various accounts of evangelical projects in Southern Asia and New England often appeared next to one another in the same printed texts also suggests that Protestants understood missionary work as a collaborative, interdenominational, and global effort.

Indians All argues that these two mission fields – North America and Southern Asia – were not in isolation from one another but actually existed in a dialogic relationship, where comparative missionary models were experimented with and, through the act of publishing, broadcast to the wider world.  Investigating these entangled missions demands that historians expand their view past the bounds of the Atlantic to reconceptualize missionary activity as a global, Supra-Atlantic process.  In doing so, this paper suggests that the history of Christian missions provides several interpretive possibilities for considering the role that Asia played in shaping Atlantic and North American sacred histories.