ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the development of Christian institutions occurred within the context of European colonialism. It also suggests that the influence of Christian ideas and institutions was much more geographically limited in Africa and Asia before 1750 than it was in Latin America. In Japan and China, Jesuits and other missionaries also accompanied European traders, but they operated within the spheres allowed them by the existing government. In many parts of Africa and Asia, the colonial powers before 1750 were largely interested in the profits of maritime trade and had no intentions of setting up large land-based colonies or transplanting large numbers of Europeans. African religious beliefs and practices were highly varied, but underlying many of them was a conception of the universe as divided between a visible world of the living and an unseen world of spirits, the gods, and the dead.
