In the long 18th century the hitherto predominant Catholic missionary activity overseas
received noticeable competition from new Christianisation projects initiated by Protestants. In
this context the anthology deals with the question of how the missionaries of different
Christian denominations in the mission areas dealt with each other when they came into contact
with each other on a daily basis. In view of their special early modern intra-Christian
pluriconfessionality two regions were chosen as the focus: the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Indian subcontinent. As the eight contributions to the volume demonstrate in detail
interconfessional contacts frequently took place in these (and numerous other regions of the
world) the conduct of which sometimes followed the patterns of interpretation and action
familiar from Europe but frequently also followed its own patterns of development due to the
specific contexts overseas. Thus the volume not only makes a contribution to the comparative
study of Christian missions in the long 18th century. At the same time it represents an
important contribution to a globalisation of confessionalisation research whose heuristic
potential for analysing non-European Christianity history in the early modern period has hardly
been tested so far.
