The expansion of traders into Asian and African interiors brought rapid, often disruptive, changes to indigenous societies, not least because the staples of those trades were often guns, cash, and drugs like liquor and opium. Increasingly, traders came under the intense criticism of burgeoning numbers of Protestant missionaries. By the end of the eighteenth century the rise of evangelicalism unleashed a religious emotionalism that stressed freely chosen conversion, spiritual equality, and activism. Protestant missionary societies emerged suddenly in Britain, led by the Baptists (1792), Congregationalists (1795), and evangelical Anglicans (1799), to be followed by other denominations and in other nations like Switzerland and Germany. As part of a larger evangelical humanitarianism, missionary activity and the campaign to abolish slavery both emerged most strongly in northwestern Europe, especially Great Britain, and the northern American states--urbanizing and industrializing regions characterized by free contract labor and growing national identities emphasizing the legal rights of free citizens. Conservative reactions to the French Revolution helped direct evangelical attention away from domestic populations and into distant areas of exploration and European expansion: the South Seas and the recently seized Indian territories were the first places to receive missionaries.

Protestant missionary societies, operating predominantly from nations where the state had ceased enforcing religious conformity, were organized as voluntary associations that while often willing to accept state aid, rejected state control. William Carey (1761-1834), the pioneer Baptist missionary to India, was the most important theorist to the Anglo-American missionary movement. He urged that missionary organizations embrace ''the spread of civil and religious liberty'' as a reality and opportunity that among the western churches necessitated new methods of organization to secure mass lay and clerical support.

By the mid-nineteenth century, public meetings and rallies, often featuring returned missionaries, and the mass publication of books and periodicals (disseminated in Britain by the millions through a national network of local parish and chapel associations) emphasized the violence, subjugation, and ignorance purportedly bred of ''heathen'' religions, and the desperate need of non-Christians for European tutelage. Support for missions crossed class lines but was strongest, as was the recruitment of missionaries, among artisans, tradesmen, clerks, manufacturers, professionals, and other ''respectable'' classes. Leadership came from the educated middle classes (many university trained by century's end) and societies relied heavily on activist women both as organizers and financial supporters. By the first decade of the twentieth century approximately ten thousand voluntarily supported European Protestant missionaries (about 80 percent British, 15 percent German, 5 percent Scandinavian, French, Dutch, and Swiss, supplemented by a rapidly increasing American force of about four thousand) were concentrating their efforts in Africa, China, and India; a parallel revival of Catholic missions, strongly French and newly aided by voluntary organizations, fielded some eight thousand missionary priests.

European missions continued to have an ambivalent relationship with colonialism. Often operating in conjunction with imperial power, as in the founding of French missions in the Congo and Tahiti or British missions in New Zealand and Uganda, missions nevertheless often had strained relations with colonial authorities, while many missionaries expressed doubts about the value of western culture to evangelization. However, the continuing problem of communication meant considerable effort was spent on linguistic work that produced pioneering grammars and dictionaries for virtually every world language. Educational work resulted in the founding of over twenty thousand mission schools by century's end. . . .

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