New book: Swedish Protestant Missionaries and Social Reordering in King Leopold’s Congo

We are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication the book, Swedish Protestant Missionaries and Social Reordering in King Leopold’s Congo, published by Routledge within our ongoing research project.

The book is a historical-anthropological study of Swedish Protestant missionaries in the Congo Free State during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines how a Swedish mission society, working under the brutal regime of King Leopold II, attempted to reshape Congolese society by transplanting Western Christian ideals into the local Kikongo-speaking context.

Rather than treating mission only as evangelisation, belief transmission, or cultural encounter, the book approaches it as a project of institutional reordering. Swedish missionaries did not simply preach Christianity. They founded schools, organized work, intervened in family life, built congregations, cared for orphaned and enslaved children, and entered into complicated relations with the colonial state. In doing so, they tried to make Christianity into a durable form of everyday social life.

The book asks what happened when these missionary ideals encountered existing Bakongo forms of kinship, authority, labor, ritual obligation, and political organization. It shows how mission stations became contested and unstable spaces where Christian ideals were translated into institutional practices, but also repeatedly destabilized by colonial violence, social conflict, dependency, and the limits of missionary control.

The study is based on extensive archival research in Swedish mission archives, including letters, diaries, reports, meeting minutes, and published missionary writings. These sources provide unusually rich material for understanding both the ambitions of Swedish Protestant mission and the contradictions that shaped its everyday practice.

The book contributes to mission studies, historical anthropology, African religious history, colonial history, and the anthropology of institutions. It is also a study of how universal religious and moral projects become socially operable only through particular institutions: schools, families, congregations, economies, and systems of authority.

The introductory chapter is available to read online here: Read the introduction to Swedish Protestant Missionaries and Social Reordering in King Leopold’s Congo.

The book page at Routledge is available here: View the book at Routledge.