The Christian message, with its strong egalitarian strains, had the potential to fundamentally subvert hierarchies and authority built on ethnic, historical, or racial arguments. Yet paternalistic missionary attitudes, which frequently assumed the superiority of Western economic and social organization, often supported colonial dependency. Indigenous responses varied widely. In India, for example, churches grew with late-century converts from the lowest castes, but more importantly both Hinduism and Islam were spurred to major reform movements and revivals by the religious and ethical challenges presented by Christianity and Western power. Africa, by contrast, saw missions evolve into flourishing African churches, but only after separatist African-led churches split from missions or charismatic leaders founded syncretic Christian sects that embraced traditional African beliefs. In every field, missions and their resources were used for local purposes, as in South Africa where in Methodist and Congregationalist missions indigenous chiefs retained considerable powers over local life while adopting market agriculture and accepting imperial protections lobbied for by missionaries. In these ways the self-supporting churches that had been the stated goal of missionary policy throughout the nineteenth century were achieved over the misgivings of white missionaries.

European missionaries were largely ineffective in responding to anti-imperialist critiques in the twentieth century. Missionary education served to shape educated elites and produced nationalist leaders in India, China, and Africa. However, the many real and imagined connections of missions to white power were emphasized by nationalists. In some areas missions met with disaster--in China, missionaries were expelled after the 1949 communist seizure of power. In others, like India, missions produced small minority communities, but failed at any meaningful dialogue with organized majority religions. In yet others missions could be succeeded by large indigenized churches, as in Africa, Korea, and Indonesia. European missionary societies remained active in the late twentieth century, but had little of the public profile and support or sense of cultural mission that characterized the nineteenth century. Instead, they evolved a philosophy of partnership and outreach, partially as a result of the postcolonial rise of independent churches throughout the world and the decline of activist European religiosity, partially through the growth of theological liberalism that spawned an ecumenical movement of world Christian cooperation. In the twentieth century, the educational, developmental, and humanitarian activities carried out by missions were extended by transnational nonprofit charitable corporations. However, the primary effect of the missionary movement from the Renaissance on has been the transformation of Christianity from an almost exclusively European faith to a far more eclectic world religion, with hundreds of millions of adherents in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The twentieth century, then, largely brought to an end the era of exploration, independent trading, and missionary activity as European pursuits carried out with almost complete cultural self-assurance. With the exploration of the polar caps in the first decades of the twentieth century, few frontiers remained that did not require the resources of a modern nation-state to explore. At the same time, the rise of modern multinational corporations and the creation of major communication and transport networks allowing retail marketing throughout the globe largely ended the age of the independent freebooting trader. Though the era of European world dominance has passed, the modern world has been significantly shaped by the economic, social, and cultural forces transmitted through the activities of exploration, trade, and proselytizing.

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