Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World by Edward E. Andrews, and: The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize by Edward T. Brett, and: Western Daughters in Eastern Lands: British Missionary Women in Asia by Rosemary Seton (review)

The three titles under review consider a range of missionary encounters and engagements and represent very different approaches to the study of Christian missions in world history. Edward E. Andrews’s Native Apostles examines Protestant evangelism in the early modern North Atlantic and joins studies like Robert Houle’s Making African Christianity (2011) and the 1996 edited collection The Covenant Makers, which “rethink missionaries from the inside out,” as Andrews puts it (p. 7), by shifting focus from the activities of European and American missionaries to their early converts whose evangelism was central to the dissemination of Christian messages and the evolution of Christian communities.¹ Edward T. Brett’s The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family is an institutional history set along a Caribbean axis, tracing the history of this congregation of Catholic religious sisters in Belize from the mission’s inception at the turn of the twentieth century until the final withdrawal of its permanent presence in 2008, after Hurricane Katrina. Rosemary Seton’s Western Daughters in Eastern Lands provides an overview of the backgrounds of British Protestant women missionaries and their professional experiences in India and China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite their differences, however, all of these studies explore the influence exercised by actors who, in their own times and places, inhabited the margins of institutional power. Viewed collectively, the books complicate the dichotomies still ascribed to mission activities and contribute to what Heather Sharkey terms the “unexpected consequences” of missionary encounters.²

Andrews’s Native Apostles is the most wide-ranging of the three studies, as well as the most methodologically ambitious. He identifies about 275 Native Americans, Africans, and African Americans who worked as missionaries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and posits, reasonably, that there were many more whose histories were not recorded. The sources he has recovered from his subjects include letters, diaries, marginal notes, and sermons written by Native American and African preachers, as well as the material produced by mission societies. By foreign mission standards, this is a large group, even given the time period covered by the study, and their presence has given him the opportunity to trace the development of indigenous forms of Christianity and interactions between diverse groups of colonized people, as well as linking the history of mission activity to the development of European racial attitudes from the 1640s until the end of the eighteenth century, when the Atlantic networks whose progress he traces were disrupted by the American Revolution and its aftermath. The first half of the book describes early attempts to convert Native Americans and, eventually, African slaves, while the second half traces more conventional missionary undertakings and attempted undertakings among native peoples beyond the American colonial frontiers and in West Africa.

Andrews begins with an assessment of the spread of Christianity in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New England. The first chapter tells the story of the Praying Towns of Massachusetts, settlements for native people created by the Puritan leader John Elliot both to “civilize” them along Puritan lines and to serve as centers for further evangelization. Here Andrews demonstrates that while the idea may have come from Elliot, its execution depended upon Native Americans who provided church and community leadership within the towns, and upon itinerant native evangelists who “connected thousands of praying Indians...