Over 276 years, 17 emperors ruled the Ming dynasty in a period that saw stability, economic growth, maritime exploration and international trade. The prevention of Mongol resurgence was paramount, with northern garrisons positioned at strategic points and a huge standing army of over one million men. The Great Wall of... More
China’s Qing dynasty (1633–19 11) was weak and precarious. The arrival of missionaries in the 19th century, and colonial attempts to exploit Asia’s vast wealth, took advantage of that weakness to overcome China’s long-standing resistance to foreign missionaries. Roman Catholics had already reached China in the 17th century but the... More
In 1820, Daoguang succeeded his father Jiaqing as emperor of the Qing dynasty and was confronted by the challenge of an empire in decline, plagued by corruption, food shortages, domestic revolts and foreign threats. The Taiping Rebellion was initiated by Hong Xiuquan, self-styled ‘Brother of Jesus Christ’ and ‘Heavenly King’,... More
The so-called “barbarians” were migratory peoples who launched attacks on the more settled societies of the old world since Roman times. In the 9th century new marauders preyed upon Christendom, drawn by the wealth accumulated by religiousestablishments and centres of commerce. The Vikings were audacious maritime marauders, who reached as... More
The early African missionaries were often redoubtable explorers. The Lutheran Johannes Rebmann was the first European to see Mt Kilimanjaro (1849), but his reports of its snow-capped summit on the equator were dismissed as malaria-induced hallucination. The founding father of the modern missionary movement was the Englishman, William Carey, with... More
Until the 1830s, the dominant purpose of European colonization in Africa was the slave trade. Thereafter, the cargo changed but economic exploitation remained the heart of the enterprise, reaching peak intensity during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ initiated by the Treaty of Berlin (1885). The record of Christian missions through this... More
By the early 19th century the London Missionary Society had focused its attention on South Asia. The British East India Company, which governed India until 1858, had always been extremely wary of the risks of disturbing Muslim and Hindu sensibilities. However, increasing pressure from evangelicals in Britain led to a... More
Christians account for 4 per cent of the population of the Middle East, and are subject to varying degrees of persecution, ranging from routine discrimination in education, employment and social life to genocidal attacks. The “Arab Spring” (uprisings in 2010/11) and the fall of established dictatorships in Egypt, Libya, Syria... More
Throughout the Middle Ages Christians sought to engage in arduous physical travel to achieve a spiritual goal If possible, they visited the actual places in the Holy Land where Jesus and the apostles had lived, or they ventured to Rome, the scene of Christian martyrdoms. After the Christian sites in... More
The nationalist movements that led most of colonial Africa to independence in the years 1958–66 were typically secular, and newly independent nations often nationalized missionary institutions. Yet the growth of Christianity accelerated in the postcolonial period. In some cases, it felt into the continents conflict. In the Rwandan genocide of... More
At the beginning of the 20th century Latin America was 90 per cent Catholic, a result of 300 years of colonization and conversion by the Spanish and Portuguese. But in 2014 that figure had dropped to 69 per cent, the result of large numbers of people leaving the Catholic Church... More
In 1949 the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China. This announcement brought to the end the costly civil war between the Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek, which had broken out immediately after the end of Word War... More