Introduction

Summary

This volume advances a novel framework to understand the nature and impact of the Protestant Reformations. It starts from the assumption that it will be fruitful for the next decades of scholarship to investigate religious change as multi-centric across Western and non-Western worlds. Protestantism during the early modern period is currently predominantly presented as a European story, and, despite a growing awareness of European networks of exchange as well as scholarship on the history of missions, much research remains confined to national boundaries. Further dialogue between scholars of the European Reformations and early Americanists, and scholars of the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa is needed to enrich the way the entire subject is conceived and taught. Historians have adopted the concept of a “long Reformation” during the past decades, but they are only beginning to substantially integrate global Protestant experiences into their accounts of the early modern world created by the Reformations, to compare Protestant ideas and practices to other world religions, to chart colonial politics and experiences, and to ask how resulting ideas and identities were negotiated by Europeans at the time.