Introduction

The Church Missionary Society began its life on Friday, 12 April 1799. On that day a group of sixteen evangelical clergymen and nine laymen gathered in an upper room of the Castle and Falcon Inn in Aldersgate Street, and resolved that, it "being a duty highly incumbent upon every Christian to endeavour to propagate the knowledge of the Gospel among the Heathen," a society to achieve that end be constituted: the Society for Missions to Africa and the East. All mission agencies in the second half of the twentieth century have had to face a certain amount of suspicion about their goals and methods. Mission archives are some of the most frequently consulted collections in many repositories. Historians of the non-Western world, with a wide range of interests, are attracted by the wealth and detail of this material on a vast range of topics: political and economic as well as cultural and religious.