This paper examines the case of the Basel Mission in Malabar and South Canara in the Indian subcontinent during the nineteenth century. The Basel Mission was a peculiar Protestant Missionary Society--it set up and engaged in various economic activities inits mission stations in South India. A formal branch of the Mission, called the Basel Trading Company (Basler Handelsgesellschaft) was created in 1859. It oversaw industries such as printing, weaving, tile and brick-making and employed various Indian converts and non-converts from surrounding areas. Additionally, the mission was involved in setting up schools and orphanages. The paper will examine the introduction and maintenance of various funds as a form of welfare measure for its European and converted Indian employees involved in the many enterprises set up by the Basel Mission. These included a sick fund, pension fund, and widow fund for the members of the mission. The paper will explore the exchange of finances and ideas between the spaces of northern Swiss-South Germany and South-Western India. It will discuss how the funds were created, disbursed and its effect on the converts. Using sources in English, German and Kannada from the Basel Mission archives, Karnataka Theological College and published reports, the paper will show how early worker-welfare practices in Europe were applied in India, and how they were received by the locals. It argues that, given the civilising approach of the missionaries towards Indian labourers, the introduction and implementation of such funds created tensions over the impact on the expected productivity of the workers. Moreover, there remained a lack of clarity on the management of these funds, showing the lack of regulation of mission finances in the colonies. Through this discussion, the paper brings out the conditionalities of welfarism by European employers for the indigenous population.

The Edict of Nantes (1685) drove Protestants out of France. They fled to Protestant countries and their colonies, where many played influential roles in reformed theology, trade and banking. Although scattered across the globe, many of these Protestant families maintained close religious and economic ties over generations, forming what became known as a Huguenot or Protestant International. Under Napoleon, Protestants were once again free to live in France, but they remained a small minority. In 1822 they founded the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. For a long time, French Protestants were marginalised by the Catholic-dominated French colonial bureaucracy. Using their global networks, they turned their attention to Protestant strongholds outside France: they raised funds from wealthy fellow believers in Switzerland, Alsace, the Netherlands, England, Sweden or the USA. And they established their largest mission station in British-dominated southern Africa. There they were welcomed by the descendants of 17th-century French Protestant refugees and became an influential power in the Southern African Kingdom of Lesotho. Examining sources from Paris and Morija, this paper will therefore discuss how Parisian evangelical bankers and believers connected France to a 19th century world increasingly dominated by Protestant powers in Europe and the world, most notably by the British Empire. And how Lesotho's royalty and converts sought to use French-speaking missionaries in their own struggles against violent Boer settlers and British colonial rule.

During the 19th century, liberating sub-Saharan children from slavery became a widespread technique of evangelization. These children were often educated in mission schools or, in some cases, (de)ported to Europe. The aim of their “liberators” was to have them return as indigenous clergy to their countries of origin after completing their studies. While this phenomenon has not been thoroughly investigated in historiography, it is a topic that should not be underestimated. I will outline the development of the Opera per il riscatto delle fanciulle more, founded in Genoa in the 1850s by the Italian priest Niccolò Olivieri and later continued by Father Biagio Verri. Olivieri and Verri were at the centre of a network that transcended national, imperial, and continental borders. Between its foundation and 1880, the Opera liberated around 1,200 Sub-Saharan children, mostly girls, from slavery and displaced them to Europe. Once in Europe (Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, etc.), these children were trained in Catholic institutions—such as monasteries and seminaries. By integrating global history and decolonial thought with original archival research, I will critically examine a phenomenon that has long been considered secondary within an overly Eurocentric narrative of mission history. Acting as apostolic missionaries under the protection of the Holy See, and with financial support from both private and public institutions, could the displacement of African children to Europe be seen as a form of slave trade, despite the missionaries' claims to the contrary? Additionally, where did the agency of these "liberated" African children lie?

This paper addresses the reconfiguration of Christian missionary work and institutions in the second half of the twentieth century. With the Rhenish Mission Society and the Bethel Mission, it focuses on two German Protestant organisations, which maintained missions in Namibia and Tanzania since the nineteenth century and thus acted in areas which had been under German colonial rule until 1918, before they were administered as League of Nations mandated territories by South Africa and Great Britain respectively. In the post war period, both missions faced multiple challenges, including, for instance, bans on the employment of German citizens, declining material and non-material support, new dependencies on colonial and later national governments, critique over their colonial past and long-standing imperial entanglements, (claims over) the Africanisation of missionary institutions, the foundation of African churches as well as the pluralisation of the international dialogue on Christian missions in the context of decolonization. These challenges not only led to multiple conflicts within the missions as well as between the missions and other political and civil society actors, but they also initiated multivocal discussions about the idea, practice and institutional form of Christian missionary work in the past, present and future. This paper introduces some of the main debates and questions their role in the transformation of missionary work and engagement.