Idealism and Lessons from History

Getting dressed in the summer is somewhat a challenge for me. I find it's much easier to feel put together in the layers that fall and winter afford, but it can be difficult to find outfits that I both feel good in and look good in as it heats up outside Finding high quality pieces with particular fabrics Linen has personally become my favorite. I think is the way to go to building a summer wardrobe that I feel good about. And that's why I keep coming back to Quint. They focus on these high quality essentials like breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk but all without the luxury markup, They one hundred percent European linen pants, dresses and tops start at just thirty two dollars. And let me tell you, I have about three pairs of their linen pants in different colors and styles. They are wide leg, really comfortable. They have this patch pocket style that I really like as well as a draw strring, and they're so lightweight and breathable, but they still look really put together, which I find is a tough balance with summer clothes It's not just clothing, Quintince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond. So it's easy to bring a more premium feel to everyday life Elevate your summer wardrobe, go to quince dot com slash history extxtra for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns Now available in Canada too Qui NCE d. com slash history extxtra for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Qince d. com slash history extxtra This episode is brought to you by Prime Obsession is in session. and this summer, Prime Originals have everything you want. steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice. have Off campus, L, everyvery year after, the love hypothesis, stirling pointoint and more, slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime Ryan Reynolds here from MidMobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for fifteen dollars a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to MintMobile today I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile d. com slash switch. Upfront payment of forty five dollars for three month plan, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required. intntro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. taxes and fees extra. Feful terms at mintMobile d. com Colonels cooked up a new ten dollar bucket of the day just for you Monday, twenty four Nuggets for ten dollars. Tuesday, eight piece fried chicken for ten dollars. Wednesday, ten wings for ten dollars. Thursday, eight tenders for ten dollars. Friday twenty four Nuggets for O you guessed it, didn't you dollars machine. The ten dollar bucket of the day deal. Every weekday. only at KFC, it's finger looking good. Prices and participation very well supplies last. not availableons for party ordering platforms tax extra Why did Protestant missionaries travel the globe across the course of centuries, only to convert remarkably few people Alec Riley, author of New book The World's Reformation tells Eleanor Evans about the neglected global history of early Protestant missions prereachers traveveled across Asia, Africa and the Americas centuries earlier than many assume and why so many of their ambitious efforts ended in confusion, contradiction and failure. We're looking today at the global Christian religious community in terms of it being the biggest the world has ever seen. It covers huge diversity and astonishing scale. And Alec, your new book looks at a more forgotten part of this spread. And before we go into this particular puzzle that you came across, I wonder if you can situate us a bit in the wider history of Christian missionary expansion and efforts. Sure. So Christianity has been a missionary religion since its very beginning This is a West Asian religion which spreads out from that base then know through the Roman Empire, but also beyond it from very early on. And that spread right across the Eurasian Landmass is a phenomenon of antiquity in the medieval period But then by the end of the medieval era, by the fifteenth century Christianity is Pominantly a European. Religion and particular variant of it that's going to dominate the modern history, Latin Christianity, Catholic Christianity as it is at that point is very much confined to central and Western Europe, and then with the global maritime opening Columbus Vaseskcaa Gama, all of that the unlocking of the puzzle of the world's oceans by European mariners, which leads to the connecting up of the globe in a way that's unprecedented fromrom the fourteen nineties onwards leads to a wave of Christian. globalization as well, which of course also goes hand in hand with the age of European empires But it's not simply an imperial story throughout the history of Mission and Empire to have an uneasy and , sometimes collaborative, sometimes conflictual relationship And one of the most obvious signs that that story is a complicated one is that the real surge in global Christianity that we've seen in the past half century has followed the collapse of the European empires rather than being driven by it. So there was a widespread expectation when the European emmpires fell apart in the post Second World War era, that that would lead to a collapse of the Christian communities that had been built up did happen in some places, but it's by no means the dominant store it And the story as we've traditionally told it over those five hundred years, is one which is led by Catholic missionaries in the wake of the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires later the French as well building up know tremendously successful Catholic communities in some parts of the world,ou south, Central America, most obviously and a more mixed tangled but really interesting story in parts of Africa and Asia as well. and then the Protestant powers become involved in the same process as the normal narrative has it from about the seventeen nineties onwards in the wake of the French and the American revolutions and as the British emmpire, especially the secondcond British Empire, the British Empire post American Revolution becomes such a globe spanning phenomena and all of that is true But it does leave an obvious gap in the story, which is that Protestantism first emerges, as is well known with the sixteenth century Reformation and is a tremendously energetic aggressive, vibrant missionary religion within Europe is fighting wars of religion, it becomes the dominant faith of at points as much as forty percent of the continent and has enormous energy behind it And yet, as the story is normally told energy dissipates as soon as you sail out of a European port to go further overseas And so that standard Protestant missionary story is seen as starting from the very end of the eighteenth century And so I set out to ask the question, why didn't it happen? Why wasn't there? a global Protestant missionary movement in the sixteenth, seventeenth eighteenth centuries So that was the book I was supposed to be writing and it didn't really happen that way. Right so this is the central question that led you to write your book, The Wld's Reformation, How Protestantism beccame a Global releligion. You're considering this longstanding consensus. It's a big question, it's a big book, but can you give us a sense of what you've found, what you've been exploring, off the resource that was poured into some of these attempts, where efforts might have been concentrated, what did you find? So the main thing that I found is that there is an awful lot more in the way of Serious missionary activity. and by missionary I should say, I mean conscious attempts to try to convert previously non Christian peoples to Christianity, toant Christianity. F more of this going on all over the world than I think has been recognized. And a lot of this has been seen by specialist scholars of particular areas. The number of times I came across spepecialist scholarships saying, Well, we all know that there's no global Protestant mission, but look, here's an exception And there comes a point when you makeet too many exceptions and you think, hang on a second, something's going on in here And I think there are interesting reasons why that story has been missed. It's very archivally Burst there's something about the Protestant's self image at the time and the sense that they always have of running to catch up with what the Catholics have done. There's no mistaking that the just sheer chronology and the scale of the empires that the Spanish and the Portuguese have tells you that this is a story where the Catholics are in the lead and the Protestants are always feeling themselves to be on the back foot But it's also clear that the other reason why it's not had the attention that I think it deserves is that these missionary efforts are often usually pretty unsuccessful in terms of actually winning converts. Not completely. There are some remarkable things happening in some places of the world and I do spend some of the book telling these stories in some ways, the central theme of the book is why it was that Despite what I think I've shown is a pretty impressive amount of energy, effort, money prayer in the level of investment that's being put into to these projects The return on them is pretty poor And I think actually that's what makes the subject more interesting because it shows that rather than this being, you know a heroic story of missionary success of the kind that was going to be told in the nineteenth century, this is a story that helps us to understand the deep preconceptions that Protestants in this period brought to this task, how they understood themselves, how they understood the world around them, and how difficult it is for them when those prejudices come into head on collision with the reality of people around the world who are just unfathomably alien and the depth of the human difference that they're encountering as they're staring across these cultural chasms, is one that I think we often find really difficult to understand in our globalized age And so things that they think are obvious truths that feel to them utterly self evident, both religious and cultural, abbsolutely stumble. in the face of these sorts of problems And so part of what I'm telling in this book is a story of those mistakes are slowly, painfully learned from And how by the the eighteenth century notot a majority by any means. crritical mass these Protestants are starting to think, hang on a second, if we're going to understand the world in this way and bring to it the good news that we urgently believe we have to. We're also going to have to understand ourselves and our own culture and differentiate ourselves from it in a different way. I think we're going to pull on some of those threads that get us a little bit closer to that understanding as we talk. Before that, can you give us a really quick sense of where these missionaries were going? What sort of scale are we looking at? So the short answer is almost everywhere. I mean, there's a map at the beginning of the book which gives you a sense of the geographical scale. I mean to give you a very quick tour. So I mean, there is an important story around the fringes of Europe itself in Northern Scandinavia and elsewhere There's Moravian missionaries in Greenland in the eighteenth century, there's a lot going on in North America, a whole range of different groups trying to reach different Native American peoples, as well as, of course, the very substantial missions to enslaved peoples in North America in the Caribbean in some cases elsewhere there's someome significant efforts taking place at points in South America ranging from fiascos like the short lived, but seriously intended in missionary terms, Scottish colony in Daren in Panama. I mean it's an utter fiasco, but really interesting story through to the Dutch colony in Brazil, which has held there for thirty odd years. and there's a very serious intentional and quite successful missionary effort taking place there You've got a number of efforts in places around the African coast. Much of that is linked to the slave trade tends to be less successful for that reason thenen you've got the Dutch presence in the Indian Ocean and beyond So you know, the Dutch holds a large part of Sri Lanka territories throughout what's now Indonesia. There's an extraordinary story of the Dutch presence on the island that we now call Taiwan across the middle of the sevententh century, which has a short lived but while at last very successful mission there. and some attempts although it's much more difficult to reach into the Asian mainland as well as closer to home efforts to reach into the Ottoman Empire, That's enormously difficult a lot of efforts put into it. and one or two individuals who are getting further than that. There's a remarkable German Lutheran who winds up as a confidident of the emperor of Abyssinia, modern Ethiopia for a number of years So those are some of the highlights, but it is a properly globe spanning story, which is one of the things that made it quite difficult to put together. Yes, you've given a real sense there that it is far from an insubstantial effort and story. And I should just mention that in Alex's recent article for History Extra Magazine, you do examine that particular episode on the island of what is today Taiwan, what you call the story of early I Protestant missions in a nutshell. so I'll leave ur listeners to go there for a bit more on that Starting or growing your own business can be intimidating and lonely at times. Your to do list may feel endless with new tasks, and lists can easily begin to overrun your life So finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything as a built in business partner can be a game changer. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and ten percent of all e commerce in the US from household names like Gymshark, Rare Beauty, and Heinz to brands just getting started Shopify has hundreds of ready to use templates that can help you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. And you can tackle all the important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments, to analytics and more No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. And if people haven't heard about your brand, you can get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. with easy to run email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing Sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shhopify d. com slash realM Go to shhopify. com slash realm That's shhopify dot com slash realm This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm not worth it, okay? Try it for yourself. Starbucks ref Freshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours Spotify, it's Jay Shdy. Are you one of those media strategy people? scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social Let me introduce you to Fat And they're here with me on Spotify Trust me, I know fans They don't skip, they stay for hours They don't move on, they manifest They're not a demographic group Theans Spotify advertise you're among fans. I wonder Alec if we can go back to some of these forgotten early Protestant missionaries and you can bring us closer to that sense of understanding. What does success look like for them and what attitudes are they perhaps bringing that we should understand? So in many ways, what success like for them, the answer is kind of simple and obvious. They wanted to convert people. They wanted to have a godly Protestant community of the kind that they would recognize. in North America or in East Asia for the Dutch, know that the number of different places where they're trying to do this, they have a model They've seen it done in Europe. And they are trying to roll that out So I mean, if you look, for example at the island of Sri Lanka which is under Dutch rule from the sixteteen fifties onwards until the end of the eighteenth century The Dutch regard this in much the same way as if they'd taken over a Catholic province in Europe they're going to have mass schooling which people are going to be required to send their children to on pains of a fine so that they'll be be raised with some basic knowledge of Christianity there will be essentially an established Protestant church, which people are required to conform to, and the assumption is that over generations will properly take root It turned out to be much more difficult than they imagined, partly because of the cultural depth and also because setting up a structure like that at scale enormously difficult just in terms of staffing it. And so although they can provide school teachers, the quality of instruction at these schools, let's say, seems to have been bumpy. So there's that kind of simple approach. We're going to try to replicate the Christian societies we've understood. And you can see different kinds of Protestants doing it in different ways. So the Puritans in New England are trying to go for something that's much more intense than involved rather than the more kind of you know, structural whole of society thing that that the Dutch and indeed some Anglican missionaries elsewhere are doing There are other temptations and possibilities lurking there as well So I mean, what one of the images that they often used to describe this process. And I spend a little bit of time in the book talking about the language that they use to talk about it I mean, I use the word missionary because people know what it means They're often wary about that. The term that they most regularly use is propagation or plantation of Christianity. So these are agricultural metaphors And if you're going to plant the Protestant gospel in a new land Well, you can do it by taming the existing wild vegetation and turning that into into a nice ordered garden But sometimes it's easier to do it just by ripping up the existing vegetation and transplanting in more familiar crops. And so there's an unease about is it about converting people or is it about converting territory? And you see that tension between a kind of immigration based transplantationist approach to the Christianization, especially of colonies in America. and in some ways, it's even more extreme in the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope tension between that and the wish to try to civilize to convert these people, especially because civilization and Christianization are understood to be intimately linked to each other. And of course by civilizing people, they mean encouraging them to adopt what they see as the self evident merits of a European lifestyle There are people within this world who are questioning that, who are saying no, either it's simply not necessary to try to persuade these people to adopt. European culture, or more commonly they will say, well, of course we want them to do that, but actually Christianization should come first But that sort of approach which can threaten or destabilize colonial project and so introduce a degree of threat because it still allows some power to the people into the culture whom you're engaging with It's so much easier. to just assume that the way to make these people Christians is to turn them into Christians like us and these children and there's a lot of language of we that the senior civilization, these innocent people, will be raised to appreciate the benefits of what we have to offer them This is one of the reasons why the more I looked into this, the more I became convinced that one of the crucial lenses for understanding the entire story as it unfolds all over the planet is the Atlantic slave trade not just because Eslaved Africans are the non Christians whom Protestants encounter more often than any others Native Americans or whoever are out there The people they've enslaved are in their houses on their estates. They meet them every day. Also because that encounter, as it seems to me, provides a template through which they are interpreting a lot of the rest of the encounters that they have with people in very different circumstances So it has a series of knock ons beyond the significance of those encounters in themselves. This evident conviction that this religion brings all of those benefits that you've just outlined in terms of quote unquote civilizational improvement or what have you How does this butt up all come up against that reality of the evil of the slave trade as it was understood? And you how might we look at it and understand it better now? This is a story I became very involved in because I found it one of the most telling that I was dealing with becausecause most Protestants during this period are intensely concerned about the evils of Atlantic slavery, but they don't worry about it and think about it in the way that we might. The idea that slavery in itself is inherently evil and is something which Christians ought to oppose is something that starts to emerge only at the very end of my period. And indeed, I think one of the reasons why there is a real change in tempo around the end of the eighteenth century is intimately tied up with the emergence of sayite trade abolitionism For that you do have a handful of folks, Quakers and others. who are regarding slavery itself as inherently wrong the much more common view from from Protestants are who are thinking about this, you know, ministers, theologians who are worried about the issue. And they are they're intensely worried about it is that There is such a thing as Christian slavery and this isn't it. The way that this particular form of slavery is being done is wrong it needs to become More paternalistic, more familial that you should be able to treat your slaves as a kind of extended spiritual family. This is from their reading of the Bible. Abraham, theci patriarch, kept slaves whom he circumcised he raises them in his religion. they are part of his household. That's the model that they want to replicate The trouble is, regardless of what you think about the applicability of that model in the ancient world, and there are obviously some pretty serious problems about that too It can't even begin to work in the context of plantation Savery the sheer scale, the industrial nature, that the level of slaughter that is attached to this and equally the level of commercialization. I mean, one of the most serious obstacles to the repeated attempt to try to Christianize the structure of slavery to create something Christian that could be made to work within Atlantic slavery is the impossibility within that subject of recognizing families formed by enslaved people. becausecause slaveholders want to be able to break up families for sale And if you can't do that for some, you know some laws put in place to prevent that absolutely undercuts the notion that enslaved people are simple property to be treated in much the same way as agricultural animals So you have a century and more of Christian thinking about this, which is trying to imagine a slavery that has probably never existed, that certainly could not exist within within that period, but which they desperately want to because it's going to avoid an open confrontation with the structures of power. not because they regard the slave system as admirable. They really don't. They're very clear about that. because it is an enormous a vast system which I mean, the idea of abolishing it perspective of the late seventeenth early eighteenth centur It seems unreal. there are repeated attempts to found colonial economies that are going to function without slavery, and they all fail becausecause as people repeatedly point out There is no way to make a sugar plantation or any of these other agricultural projects pay for themselves unless they are depending on slave labor. I think about it as the way that that we talk about oil nowadays and that Lots of people would like to have run an economy without oil. There's been lots of attempts to do it, lots of people have talked about it. Nobody's ever yet managed to make it work It has something of that quality to it But then over the course of the eighteenth century becomes clearer to more and more that trying to form a viable Christianity within the slave system is not just difficult but is a contradiction in terms. But one of the people I use a lot as a witness for this is a man named Philip Quaku who was the first African to be ordained in the Church of England. rememarkable man in many ways. He spends fifty years after his ordination as a missionary working for the Church of England Society for the Propagation of the Gospel the British slaving station at Cape Coast in what's now Ghana close to his own home. He himself had never been enslaved. And he has a remarkably unsuccessful career. as a missionary. in some ways, I'd my sense of him as a character is he's probably not really cut out for it although he is deeply committed to it but he becomes increasingly clear as the years go on that the contradiction of trying to spread the Protestant Gspel from a slave trading station. what is making this profoundly impossible And he becomes very clear that what he calls the horrid slave trade is the most serious block that he is facing in trying to do this work and not just him, but a number of people, again, a critical mass of people, particularly in Britain and in Britain's American colonies reach their the conviction that unless that trade itself is interrupted they're not going to be able to pursue the project of Christianization to which they're so committed And that's one of the things that pitches us into a new world from the seventeen seventies, seventeen eighties onwards. Right. So if this contortion, this sort of onciliation changes at the end of the eighteenth century. There are other factors before that that are also proving blockers to the spread to the success of these missionary efforts. I wonder you mentioned in your first answer about Cathalolics quote unquote being in the lead. And I wonder how these missions related in terms of scale and methods of the Catholic missionary efforts. didid they look to one another? Was there a sense of comparison or even competition there? A very strong sense of rivalry. I mean certainly amongst the Protestants who feel themselves to be playing catch up the whole time. And I mean, one of the regular themes of the rhetoric, which I think has actually proved misleading to historians is there's a lot of bewailing of how little we've done, it's shameful and all this, which I think we're sometimes inclined to take a little literally when they're usually just trying to reproach their audience and say, you know, come on, put your hands in your pockets about this That sense that there are Catholics everywhere. and that that's the fundamental challenge they've got to deal with is of course, a direct reflection of the wars of religion that are unfolding in Europe at the time you know, Protestants everywhere are obsessed with with the, you know, the popish antichrist pursuing that etition with Rome. you see it, you know, in the most unlikely places So I mean, I was talking about Sri Lanka earlier, the first Dutch minister in Sri Lanka having set up the first of these schools is writing home very proudly to say, these pupils are able to denounce all kinds of popish errors Okay, there had been a Catholic presence on the island. That wass not It's not as if he's imagining this out of nowhere Even so there's something a little strange about that. In terms of numerical scale very hard to make a a meaningful comparison partly because Catholics for excellent reasons that make sense within Catholic theology are often pretty free and easy about baptizing people, because baptism is itself an efficacious means of grace if you're a Catholic. whereas Protestants are usually much more careful about making sure they have a kind of proper deep conversion one of the early Prostant motionaries in Massachusetts has this great line about how, you know, if we were to adopt the same methods that Catholics did, we'd be converting people by the thousands, but we've not yet learned the art of putting Christ's stamp onto people as if onto copper metal you know, saying thing Catholics are producing this kind of mass produced rubbish whereas we're producing this kind of artisanal hand crafted quality of a quantity sort of idea. Exactly. And you think if you're having to make that kind of argument, then you know you're already on the back foot. So in terms of sheer scale of effort the Catholics establish and maintain lead if you want to think about it in those terms There's certainly a Catholic awareness of this rivalry So you have Catholics in many parts of the world when they become aware that Protestant books are being introduced, they're going to a lot of trouble to try to buy them up and destroy them, to them stop them getting out any more widely than they can There's very direct rivalry between Protestants and Catholic missionaries in North America, the Protestants backed by the British Catholics backed by the French. One of the most obvious distinctions is that Protestants in many places are much readier to ain and authoriseed ministers have come from convert backgrounds. I mentioned Philip Guacu but there are a number of others in particular the Dutch and Sri Lanka and also there's an extraordinary joint German Danish British missionary effort in South India in Tamamadu from the early eighteenth century onwards These are communities which employ lots of indigenous people as schoolmasters, as deacons in those sorts of roles and In some cases, not a trivial number of cases as fully ordained. ministers And some of them like Philip Quaku are straining to be, you know he's working to be more English than the English and to show how absolutely loyal he is to the church that's accepted him Others are much more willing to stand up for them selves and their own kinsfolk And I spend some time in the book talking about one of the most remarkable of these. A Mahhegan, a Native American named Santa Ocham. to becomes a very forceful advocate for his own people's rights in the years before, during and after the American Revolution while also being a minister of the Presbyterian Church. So your book clearly demonstrates this breadth, this persistence of this missionary culture that has been forgotten. and you gave an answer earlier on that a lot of that is to do with the various failures. In an article you've written for History Extra Magazine, you mentioned that one other factor why it may have been a failure is a sense of over optimistic idealism. The sense that this religion, the benefits of this religion were self explanatory and didn't need any extra effort, perhaps in some cases. I want to ask particularly about the Welshman William Jones and his idea of how they might achieve success Yes, I mean there is this Almost charming naivety to that's Ch charming until you look again and then it's got a kind of dark swirl in it. They have this, you know, intense naivety about the self evident truth and attractiveness of there of their religion They can see that it's true, surely, it's going to be obvious. They say something very similar about the quality of their own lifestyle have it completely normal for people in North America for European settlers in North America to think, you know all we have to do is provide our Indigenous neighbors with an example of how much better our lifestyle is, how much more prosperous we are with kind of modern agriculture and so forth And they will realize that they don't want to live like naked savages running in the wood and will instead come to embrace this self evident superiority of our way of life and the religion that goes with it And this can lead to a and often genuine bafflement It doesn't seem to be working. You know, we've shown them what more could they possibly want than seeing how well this works? And this plays out in you a number of different ways in different settings. when you mentioned you know, William Jones who has this? I mean, well is it Charming. It tells you something about their preconceptions He has a suggestion for how India to be. convert it which is that to be produced with a condensed version of the Christian Bible in it. So he wants some of the Old Testament prophecies and then enough documentation to demonstrate that they're authentic. and then selections from the New Testament both giving an account of Jesus' life ministry at death resurrection, while also demonstrating that the prophecies in them are fulfilled, the acts of the apostles, other bits and pieces. So this kind of basic primer in Christianity And he says, all that you should do is have this book translated into various Indian languages printed and dispersed and just let it seep out. As soon as people encounter it That will do more than anything else can to you know, the self evident attractiveness of this doctrine will persuade people. Even in that I would say he's moved on from some of the earlier approaches which say, you know, we just need to go and live there It's becoming clearer and clearer by the eighteenth century that actually one of the major obstacles to converting people to Christianity is when they meet actual Christians who don't tend to behave in a morally exemplary way, especially in a colonial setting. And so one of the things that's think striking about Jones' suggestion is that we don't want to contaminate their view of Christianity by having them meet actual Christians. muchuch better to put the ideal out there I mean it's not that he's Aly wrong when one looks at the wider history of Christian missions, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, you can see, well, okay, not exactly that But There are times in which the message has slipped out of missionary control and run ahead of itself and being taken on board and indigenized by peopleop all over the world, sometimes in a enormously constructive way, as has happened in large parts of Africa, although you could tell the story of the typing rebellion in China, perhaps the bloodiest war of the whole of the nineteenth century as a consequence of that kind of self starting missionary dispersion I think that sense of the naivety you see at work, that kind of blithe faith Really, they don't need to do anything because the self evident power of the message will be enough is I've came to see that as a kind of key feature for understanding the period for two reasons, both because it helps to explain how reticent they often are to take more kind of aggressive missionary strategies. There's an awful lot of let's just print books and disperse them with very little sense of We're going to invest enormous amounts of money sometimes into these printing projects with no real plan for how we're going to get them into the hands of people who might want to read them So in some ways, I think it helps to explain the relative lack of success. that kind of noaity But I mentioned the dark swirl of it as well because the other effect when it doesn't work course it usually doesn't work Who are you going to blame Well you can say, well, it's our fault because the moral example we're setting is it doesn't live up to it But it's so much more satisfying to be able to say, well, it's their fault. We showed them. what more could we have done Clearly God doesn't want these people to be converted. Clearly they're too bestial. They need to be forcibly civilized first. Maybe know the Christian Gspel isn't really for them And so while in some ways, this approach has a kind of gentleness and respect to it, you're giving people their own agency, and Protestants will often talk about how much better this is than the kind of enforced missionary work that you see amongst the Spanish very fond of contrasting themselves to know the Spanish brutality. In fact, it can turn almost as vicious at the end. because It's still within a context of colonial power And as much as many of them may wish to disentangle themselves from it That's easier said than done. Yes, there's definitely an insidiousness there, this idea that you other the people that you're maybe also trying to bring into a fold and all the darkness that that entails. You've taken us through quite a few the factors today of why many of these efforts failed. You've already said that that's caused much more of it to be forgotten But I guess the point of your book and your work is that these did happen and that these do exist and have a lot to tell us. Much more is in the book and much more is in your article for History Extra Magazine as well. But Alec, is there any other further thoughts you'd like to end on here as we point people towards those onward reading? Well, maybe just just one thing to to add to that which is that, yes, this stuff deserves to be remembered because it happened you know, I think that there's a you know, a global story here that we've that we've not noticed and that it is significant in its in its own right I also have come to be convinced that it's important consequences for more recent times and for our own times as well when we look back at these people Fundamental mistake they seem to be making repeatedly over and over again in a kind of How could you be so stupid away from our perspective is that they do not understand of the cultural chasms over which they're looking their simple conviction of the rightness of their own culture and civilization and religion and I mean, not just unwillingness, I almost inability to take seriously the fact that they might have to some distance from themselves and learn something from other peopless That's an enormously difficult leap for them to make. It's a leap that