Missions and the Military: the British Empire and Commonwealth, c.1800–1960
Year: 2025

Both Protestant and Catholic missionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been popularly construed as aiders and abetters of British imperialism, an image reinforced by what is widely perceived as their ineluctable alignment with the armed forces of the British Empire, and by their prominence in many colonial campaigns.However, this image rests on a selective reading of a fundamentally unstable relationship between a highly disparate missionary movement and imperial military