The overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ 193 member states were once colonies of Western empires. Most of these colonies gained independence during the era of decolonization that followed the Second World War. Despite their numbers and their nationalist struggles, these colonies-cum-countries have not attracted much attention in the standard works on nationalism. As the editors of this volume observe, those works are largely Eurocentric in their orientation. They generally portray the rise of nationalism in colonial dependencies as supplemental to, and largely derivative of, nationalism in the Western world.1 Even Benedict Anderson, a specialist on Southeast Asia who was deeply knowledgeable about nationalist movements in the colonial world, characterized these movements in his hugely influential Imagined Communities as conforming to a modular design that originated with American and European nationalism and nations.2

Chapter 4 discusses the circle that formed around the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662). Its overarching argument is that utilitarian science offered guidance in finding the simplicity of the unum necessarium (Luke 10:42), a common theme exalted by contemporary Millenarianism of the Protestant cause. In practical terms, knowledge about necessities became the means to achieving that goal of faith. The scepticism of the period and its obvious corrupting effects on morality and devotion led to inventiveness in pursuit of substitutes for the classical moral principle of the light of reason. The Reformers worked towards a political and theological project of a utilitarian science as a means by which to reach God and reproduce Paradise on earth. Scientific knowledge about trade became central and was expressed, significantly, in the momentous Navigation Acts of 1651.

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century African Atlantic authors perceived in the lives of Black people, distorted and destroyed by the slave system, a chaos that could be understood, protested, and then converted into a transition to a better Black world. The key to this understanding was Reformed Christian religion, and the guides to this transition were supposed to be religiously informed writers. Texts of early African Atlantic authors treat the changes they observed in the lives of Black people, for example, in the human body being reproduced in new sexual and labor regimes, in foods consumed in West Africa and the Americas, and in music as performed in old and new contexts. The telos of Black lives was a divinely inspired utopia, one millenarian version of which was Sierra Leone. Black authors responded to one another concerning their visions of holy goals for their people. The persistence of the slave system and new forms of racism crushed concrete efforts to create new Black societies in places like Sierra Leone. Yet textual interactions – these Black authors responding to one another – constituted the origins of the African American literary tradition. Black millenarian letters closed the eighteenth century; Black literature opened the nineteenth century.

Historians have recognized parallels between the temporalized chain of being and early ideas about human progress, both being seen as the ascent of a linear scale of development towards a predetermined goal. But the sequence of developmental stages postulated by social thinkers could be defined in different ways depending on whether the goal was a spiritual one (paradise) or a more utilitarian vision of a perfectly ordered society guaranteeing happiness for all (utopia). This chapter outlines the emergence of the more spiritual approach, noting its origins in Christian millenarianism and the hope that Christ's message would eventually lead humanity to regain the state of perfection it enjoyed before the Fall. Eighteenth-century advocates of social progress such as Joseph Priestley saw it as a process of spiritual evolution, a view developed further by liberal Christian thinkers in the following century. Idealist philosophers such as Hegel also defined history in terms of humanity's ascent of a spiritual scale, although their later followers over-simplified the message. There were speculations about the nature of the future society which would give full rein to our spiritual nature.

Chapter 5 focuses on Edmund Ludlow as the author of his exile memoir ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ and the facilitator and editor of a French translation of the infamous Speeches and Prayers of Some of the Late King’s Judges (1660) as a martyrology of his fellow regicides. The two projects are closely related, as the French pamphlet, which appeared in 1663 under the title Les juges jugez, se justifiants, and the process of its publication are documented in the ‘Voyce’. One may in fact have inspired the writing of the other. Les juges is the work of a religious and political activist attempting to make the fate of his executed brothers known across Protestant Europe. The ‘Voyce’ is the manuscript of an autobiography or memoir which was published after its author’s death in a carefully edited version that was to serve a political purpose of its own. Yet both works are document to Ludlow’s rejection of divine-right monarchy, his strong belief in the justice of the republican cause as the cause of God, his deeply held religious conviction and the providential role he assigned to his fellow republicans in preparing the way for the Lord.

In the early eighteenth century, Pietist networks in Germany initiated missionary projects in South India and over the years in different parts of the world. Millenarian expectations and their distinctive concept of the future, shaped the Protestant mission to South India in every respect from planning and communication, medialization and fundraising, right down to the local missionary work. Four dynamics of the globalization of Protestantism are central to the contribution: (1) transregional and transnational network building with the participation of women and men in Protestant Europe; (2) the transfer of knowledge and objects from Europe to India and vice versa; (3) transcultural interactions and the importance of converted Indians for the local missionary work; (4) the consolidation of the European religious Identity through the medialization of the mission with the narrative of progress. The article examines letters between the organizers of the mission to South India in Halle, London, and at the Danish court; the correspondence between Halle and male and female donators for the mission in Europe; and the published mission journal.

Across East Asia, the period after the Mongol retreat was one of rebuilding and reordering. As they solidified political power, new regimes in China, Korea and Japan aggressively established authority over the religious realm, demanding compliance with moral and ritual norms, managing certain types of religious pluralism and violently crushing deviant devotion and organised religious resistance. Violence pervaded religion itself. Theological exploration of ideas such as cosmic destruction and rebirth, divine retribution, enforcer deities and the morality of killing for a greater good created stylised roles for both victims and perpetrators of violence. These themes manifested differently across the region. After Japanese militarists destroyed Buddhist mountain strongholds, lay armies defending the dharma fought with the ferocity of the faithful. Persecuted Christian converts willingly met martyrdom in the Catholic idiom. In China, the undercurrent of millenarian ideas that circulated through banned texts and teachings proved impossible to contain. These ideas could quickly militarise in response to stress, feeding a devastating cycle of rebellion and repression that continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across the region, temples and monasteries fought for resources, and religious affiliations often provided a spark for local tensions to erupt into organised violence.

Over its long reign, the Qing imperial state aggressively pursued unauthorized religion, both to uphold its own spiritual hegemony, and to avert religious militarization. With growing social dislocation over the nineteenth century, the dynasty faced a massive explosion of religious violence – a seemingly irrepressible series of millenarian “White Lotus” movements in central China, Muslim uprisings in the north and southwest, and the pseudo-Christian Taiping Rebellion that divided the country for more than a decade. Together, these rebellions and their suppression claimed the lives of tens of millions. The anti-Christian Boxer Uprising was brutally extirpated by a coalition of foreign forces, but at least as deadly were the waves of recriminations between Chinese villages. After coming to power in 1949, the Communist regime moved quickly to contain religion, expelling Catholic missionaries and initiating a suppression of native groups like Yiguandao. Policy towards religion appeared to soften in the 1990s, and yet remained highly vigilant towards any hint of millenarianism or religious sedition. Even knowing this, few observers were prepared for the sheer brutality of the 1999 campaign against Falungong (Dharma Wheel Practice).