History and Social Studies Education

Office hours: W 2:15--4:15 PM/by appointment Image: Queen Elizabeth II shakes hands with E.L. Allen, Minister of Educa@on, at Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica on Nov. 26, 1953, where the Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh greeted more than 2,000 school children lined up on the park's cricket field. The Duke, le`, steps up to greet Mr. Allen as Harold Houghton, second from right, director of Educa@on, and G.M. Dacosta, right, president of the Cricket Club, wait their turns to meet the royal couple. The Queen is the first Bri@sh ruling monarch in history to visit the Bri@sh rum and sugar colony. Man wearing plumed hat is not iden@fied. (AP Photo)

While the missionary presence in the British Empire has long been a source of nuanced and critical historical enquiry, the same cannot be said for the French colonies. Instead studies of the French colonial empire have, until recently, either largely ignored missionaries or written them off as willing handmaidens of French colonial administrators. Elizabeth Foster's Faith in Empire joins a growing body of literature replacing this overly simplistic view of the French colonial experience with a messier and more accurate one in which missionaries were important colonial agents with their own agenda who frequently clashed with local officials over competing visions of French colonial goals and obligations.