Mission: possible – what church records can tell us about non-Western societies’ demographic past

Christian conversion efforts have left their traces. The spread of Christianity from Western Europe to the rest of the world represents one of the more remarkable cultural transformations of humankind. Christian global expansion provides an extraordinary heritage to historical demographers with particular interest in the long-run development of non-Western societies. The detailed and systematic ecclesiastical record-keeping of Western missionaries, as well as their local successors, not only make Christian church book registers an exceptional empirical basis for the study of demographic history in today’s developing world, but they also constitute an excellent source of information for examining the demographic reception of, and the responses to, Western European encounters.