Missions spread rapidly along the routes of Portuguese and Spanish trade and conquest, as priests and friars frequently accompanied exploration and trading voyages. The nature of missionary practice was strongly determined by its relationship to colonial power, with coercive methods employed more frequently in areas of strong political control. In the East centers like Goa, Macao, and Nagasaki rose rapidly as missionary as well as trading hubs, but only in strongly controlled port enclaves like Goa could religion and governance be melded in crusading style through forced conversions.

Outside these enclaves missionaries in the eastern empires--many recruited from urban and cosmopolitan Italy as well as Portugal--adopted accommodationist strategies; notably, Jesuit missionaries embraced indigenous dress and customs, allowed converts local rituals, and developed indigenized Christian rites and sympathetic responses to eastern religious beliefs. In China Jesuits were able to exchange knowledge in western science at the imperial court for the opportunity to convert, by the seventeenth century, approximately thirty thousand followers; in southern India missions more successfully drew perhaps a quarter million converts, many from lower castes seeking Portuguese protection; and even more spectacularly in Japan, some 300,000 were converted in a period of internal Japanese turmoil.

Many converts appear to have been attracted by the ethical content of Christianity; however, inducements to conversion, including commercial favoritism and bribery, and extensive missionary trading generated vigorous criticism among priests and friars of different nationalities and orders, as well as from Asian elites. State persecutions in China and Japan largely extinguished missionary influence in these regions by the eighteenth century. Despite the problems of penetrating eastern societies, however, Catholic missions secured as many as a million converts (from populations of tens of millions) in the lands surrounding the Indian Ocean, many linked to trading communities associated with Eurasians and the Portuguese. In the process of contact, excellent, detailed missionary reports of China, Japan, the Pacific, and other areas (including pioneering studies of eastern languages like Chinese and Vietnamese) generated a much greater knowledge of the East. . . .

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