Protestant Missionary Children's Lives, C.1870-1950

Protestant missionary children’s historical lives are examined from the perspectives of parents, churches and children, to reveal complicated existences. This book takes a comparative approach across a range of settings, drawing on oral history, childhood history and histories of emotion. It extends scholarship into the mid-twentieth century. -- .

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Protestant missionary children were uniquely ‘empire citizens’ through their experiences of living in empire and in religiously formed contexts. This book examines their lives through the related lenses of parental, institutional and child narratives. To do so it draws on histories of childhood and of emotions, using a range of sources including oral history. It argues that missionary children were doubly shaped by parents’ concerns and institutional policy responses. At the same time children saw their own lives as both ‘ordinary’ and ‘complicated’. Literary representations boosted adult narratives. Empire provided a complex space in which these children navigated their way between the expectations of two, if not three, different cultures. The focus is on a range of settings and on the early twentieth century. Therefore, the book offers a complex and comparative picture of missionary children’s lives. -- .