British Anglo-Catholic and high church Anglicans promoted a new set of foreign missionary initiatives in the Pacific and South and East Africa in the 1860s. Theorizing new indigenizing models for mission inspired by Tractarian medievalism, the initiatives envisioned a different and better engagement with ‘native’ cultures. Despite setbacks, the continued use of Anglican sisters in Hawai‘i and brothers in Melanesia, Africa and India created a potent new imaginative space for missionary endeavour, but one problematized by the uneven reach of empire: from contested, as in the Pacific, to normal and pervasive, as in India. Of particular relevance was the Sandwich Islands mission, invited by the Hawaiian crown, where Bishop T. N. Staley arrived in 1862, followed by Anglican missionary sisters in 1864. Immensely controversial in Britain and America, where among evangelicals in particular suspicion of ‘popish’ religious practice ran high, Anglo-Catholic methods and religious communities mobilized discussion, denunciation and reaction. Particularly in the contested imperial space of an independent indigenous monarchy, Anglo-Catholics criticized what they styled the cruel austerities of evangelical American ‘puritanism’ and the ambitions of American imperialists; in the process they catalyzed a reconceptualized imperial reformism with important implications for the shape of the late Victorian British empire.

This study focuses on disputes among Dutch Calvinists (Reformed Protestants) in Asia and in Europe over how to administer the sacraments of baptism and communion to people with little or no exposure to Protestant Christianity. Historians have tended to view these conflicts as evidence of Calvinist rigidity and the incompatibility between Protestantism and non-European societies. When examined within global patterns of Christianization, however, it becomes clear that Calvinists had much in common with Roman Catholic missionaries in trying to convert people across cultural borders. All missionaries had to negotiate the inherent tensions between accommodation and orthodoxy in early modern missionary programmes. Many Calvinists on the missionary frontier, like their Catholic counterparts, opted for syncretistic strategies over objections from authorities in their religious heartland.