ABSTRACT
Britain had forced China to open its ports to British trade in a series of wars and treaties between 1842 and 1886, but in the 1880s and 1890s Britain solidified its commercial access to the interior of China, and American missionaries began to pour into previously inaccessible parts of the country. Western imperial bullying combined with American religious expansionism opened up new opportunities for British missionaries, who had established footholds in China in the very early nineteenth century but had been unable to create much of an institutional presence. The killings of western missionaries and Chinese Christians during the Boxer Rebellion in 1899-1900 had much the same effect on the missionary world as the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which is to say, surprisingly little beyond the creation of new martyrs; 153 Protestant missionaries were killed-some of them beaten to death-along with fiftythree of their children. Over 30,000 Chinese Christians were also killed, the large majority of them Roman Catholic.1 In much British mission rhetoric the rebellion was depoliticized, treated as a large misunderstanding or perhaps even some kind of natural disaster, as missionary societies reasserted their determination to occupy all parts of China and, for that matter, the entire world.
