History of Quakerism

The birth of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1698 marks the beginning of direct institutional involvement by the Church of England in missionary activity abroad, and a new season of proselytism. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numerous societies of religious propaganda were created both by the Established Church and non-conformists in Great Britain and Ireland, starting with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701. The clear connection between missionary activity and British imperial expansion has been extensively investigated by historians, who have often highlighted the rhetorical and political importance of the British colonial enterprise in shaping new global Christianities. Neglected in this narrative has been the intense missionary action that these organizations, and British Protestantism more widely, engaged in towards Catholic Europe.

The conference aims to investigate the historical and theoretical context that favoured the birth of missionary institutions, looking in particular at their actions in continental Europe. We want to put together historians of the British Isles, of continental Europe, global historians, experts in Protestantism, Catholicism, and Jewish history, and ask them to go beyond the traditional boundaries of their historical disciplines. Furthermore, we will explore the origins of this missionary commitment in the religious and political turmoil of the seventeenth century, moving away from earlier approaches which emphasised the role of (solely) English religious life after the Glorious Revolution. Similarly, we adopt a long-term overview, overturning the distinction between early modern and modern: we are including the nineteenth century in our investigation, highlighting the continuity of Anglican and non-conformist missions in Europe. In doing so, we position the conference at the forefront of the debate on religious history, contributing to the radical reconsideration of the chronology of European religious history currently debated by historians. Finally, we believe necessary a constant comparative approach with Catholic missions.

This new approach is also an attempt to change the traditional perspective that saw the global Evangelical expansion as a one-way movement outwards from Europe, to the peripheries of the world.

It is our contention instead that global missions and the emergence of global Christianities profoundly changed European churches at home. The attempt to spread Protestantism in Europe was indeed the product of a missionary experiment that had been tested in America, Africa, and Asia. It is our ambition to show how, in a striking theoretical overturn, continental Europe was considered a missionary land, just another periphery of the world, whose centre was instead in Imperial Britain.

Catholic countries (particularly Spain and Italy) were often described using colonial language, with an emphasis on their backwardness, and their need to modernize. In this sense, the British missionary offensive in Europe has provided conceptual material to what can be called a true "imaginary colonialism". In the ideological construction of a global Evangelical Christianity, the history of this (failed) attempt to convert Europe had a role that has not been adequately investigated until now.