The protestant missionaries that didn't change the world

Why did Protestant missionaries travel the globe across the course of centuries only to convert remarkably few people? Alec Ryrie, author of new book The World's Reformation, tells Eleanor Evans about the neglected global history of early Protestant missions, how preachers travelled across Asia and Africa and the Americas centuries earlier than many assume, and why so many of their ambitious efforts ended in confusion, contradiction, and failure. We're looking today at the global Christian religious community in terms of it being the biggest the world has ever seen. It covers huge diversity and astonishing scale.

And Alec, your new book looks at a more forgotten part of this spread. And before we go into this particular puzzle that you came across, I wonder if you can situate us a bit in the wider history of Christian missionary expansion and efforts. Sure. So Christianity has been a missionary religion since its very beginning.

This is a a West Asian religion which spreads out from that base then through the Roman Empire, but also beyond it from from very early on. And that spread right across the Eurasian. land mass is a phenomenon of antiquity and of the medieval period. But then by the end of the medieval era, by the 15th century, Christianity is predominantly a European religion. And the particular variant of it that's going to dominate the modern history, Latin Christianity, Catholic Christianity as it is at that point, is very much confined to central and western

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