This book looks back to the period 1860 to 1950 in order to grasp how alternative visions of
amity and co-existence were forged between people of faith both within and resistant to
imperial contact zones. It argues that networks of faith and friendship played a vital role in
forging new vocabularies of cosmopolitanism that presaged the post-imperial world of the 1950s.
In focussing on the diverse cosmopolitanisms articulated within liberal transnational networks
of faith it is not intended to reduce or ignore the centrality of racisms and especially
hegemonic whiteness in underpinning the spaces and subjectivities that these networks formed
within and through. Rather the book explores how new forms of cosmopolitanism could be
articulated despite the awkward complicities and liminalities inhabited by individuals and
characteristic of cosmopolitan thought zones.
