Protestantism & Protestant Churches – The Bell Bookshop

Global Calvinism

Emma — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A comprehensive study of the connection between Calvinist missions and Dutch imperial expansion during the early modern period

“A tour de force offering the reader the best study of global Calvinism in the realms of the Dutch East India Company.”-Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, editor, Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age

Calvinism went global in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as close to a thousand Dutch Reformed ministers, along with hundreds of lay chaplains, attached themselves to the Dutch East India and West India companies. Across Asia, Africa, and the Americas where the trading companies set up operation, Dutch ministers sought to convert “pagans,” “Moors,” Jews, and Catholics and to spread the cultural influence of Protestant Christianity. As Dutch ministers labored under the auspices of the trading companies, the missionary project coalesced, sometimes grudgingly but often readily, with empire building and mercantile capitalism. Simultaneously, Calvinism became entangled with societies around the world as encounters with indigenous societies shaped the development of European religious and intellectual history. Though historians have traditionally treated the Protestant and European expansion as unrelated developments, the global reach of Dutch Calvinism offers a unique opportunity to understand the intermingling of a Protestant faith, commerce, and empire.

The world turned upside down

Emma — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

‘His finest work and one that was both symptom and engine of the concept of “history from below” … Here Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, the early Quakers and others taking advantage of the collapse of censorship to bid for new kinds of freedom were given centre stage’ Times Higher Education

In ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering ‘masterless’ men, the outbursts of sexual freedom, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan – these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs.

‘Established the concept of an “English Revolution” every bit as significant and potentially as radical as its French and Russian equivalents’ Daily Telegraph

‘Brilliant … marvellous erudition and sympathy’ David Caute, New Statesman

‘This book will outlive our time and will stand as a notable monument to the man, the committed radical scholar, and one of the finest historians of the age’ The Times Literary Supplement

‘The dean and paragon of English historians’ E.P. Thompson