The wide interest in missionary history and source materials is a notable feature of current modern historical scholarship. Hitherto such sources have been regarded as impossibly "tainted", too dominated by religious zeal to provide worthwhile information or objective insights. Now they are being appreciated by scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and intellectual backgrounds. The present volume brings together scholars and archivists with a wide experience of missionary materials in order to show the exceptional wealth of missionary archives and the major contributions they can make not only to the study of the processes of Christian envangelism and Western imperialism in Africa and Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but also their value in documenting and analyzing the nature of Western encounters with indigenous societies and the light which these sources can shed on African and Asian societies.