Esme Cleall
is an historian of the British Empire who works at the University of Sheffield. Her first book, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, c. 1840–1900 (2012), was published with Palgrave Macmillan, and her second, Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and its Empire, c. 1800–1914 (2022), by Cambridge University Press. Her interests lie in the construction of difference, including the differences of race, gender, religion, and disability, in colonial discourse.
Joanna Cruickshank
is an Associate Professor in History at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. She has published widely on the history of missions in Australia, most recently co-authoring (with Patricia Grimshaw), White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments: Maternal Contradictions (2019). Earlier volumes include Pain, Passion and Faith (2009) and Evangelists of Empire? (2011), edited with Amanda Barry, Andrew Brown-May, and Patricia Grimshaw. She is currently one of the Chief Investigators on an Australian Research Council-funded project examining the history of Indigenous leadership in conducting lawful relations in Australia.
Elizabeth Elbourne
is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University. Her publications include Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842 (2022), Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Struggle for Christianity in Britain and the Cape Colony, 1799–1853 (2002) and Sex, Power and Slavery (2014), co-edited with Gwyn Campbell. Her current research, from which the chapter in this volume draws, is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project on the British and hunters in the early nineteenth century.
Norman Etherington
is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Western Australia. His many books include Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa (1978), The Great Treks (2001), Missions and Empire (2005), Mapping Colonial Conquest (2007), Theories of Imperialism (2015), and Imperium of the Soul (2017). His articles include contributions in the American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, Church History, History in Africa, Itinerario, and the Journal
David Maxwell
is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is author of Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s–1990s (1999) and African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (2006). With Patrick Harries he co-edited The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa (2012). He was long-time editor of The Journal of Religion in Africa. His third monograph, Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022.
Jane Samson
is Professor of History at the University of Alberta, and a specialist in Pacific history, missions, British colonialism, and Indigenous Pacific Christianity. She is the author of Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands (1998), and Race and Redemption: British Missionaries Encounter Pacific Peoples, 1797–1920 (2017). Her current publications include volume two of the Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, which she is co-editing with Anne Hattori, and biographies of Indigenous clergy in the Melanesian Mission.
Bronwyn Shepherd
recently completed her Ph.D. at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. Her thesis is titled “Making a Mission Space: Milingimbi Methodist Mission, 1923–1943”. She is a member of the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin and her research contributes to the scholarship outlining the complex history of Indigenous-settler relations in settler colonial contexts. Her co-authored chapter (with Joanna Cruickshank) on Methodism at Milingimbi is forthcoming in The Inventions and Reinventions of Methodism: Sect, Church and Radical Movement (2023).
Amy E. Stambach
is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Visiting Fellow at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa. She has held appointments at the University of Toronto and Soka University and a professorial post at the University of Oxford.
Geoffrey Troughton
is Associate Professor and Programme Director of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is author of New Zealand Jesus: Social and Religious Transformations of an Image, 1890–1940 (2011), and editor of several works including two volumes on Christianity and peacemaking in New Zealand: Saints and Stirrers (2017) and, with Philip Fountain, Pursuing Peace in Godzone (2018). He has published widely on the history of Christianity in New Zealand and the Pacific region. His research focuses especially on issues related to religion in society, the politics of religion, and contemporary religious change.