Political destinies were shaped mainly by patterns of European trade and migration interacting with indigenous political structures. Two models of foreign settlement crystallised in the nineteenth century, with very different long-term implications. In Australia and New Zealand, indigenous people were outnumbered by European settlers who gained power through settler states and controlled the political agenda. This chapter relies partly on unpublished archival material for Protestant missionary societies. The most complete collection is that of the London Missionary Society, in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Microfilm copies have been made available in several other libraries, including the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The Mitchell Library also holds the bulk of Methodist missionary archival material. Anglican archives are held in Lambeth Palace, London, in the Library of the University of Papua New Guinea, and in several depositories in New Zealand and the Solomon Islands. These collections are described in the bibliographies of Langmore, Missionary Lives; and Hilliard, God's Gentlemen.

Apart from the Coptic Church in Ethiopia and Egypt and the established settlements of Christian whites in North and South Africa and of Christian Creoles in Freetown, Christian influence in Africa was still largely restricted to a thin scatter of missionary outposts. Some of the most notable Christian advances had been made in the absence of foreign missionaries, and the future development and maturity of the indigenous churches would largely depend on the elimination of missionary control and paternalism. The pioneer pace-setters throughout the nineteenth century had been the great Protestant missionary societies, many of them originating from the evangelical revival at the end of the eighteenth century. With their Pan-African vision, the South African Ethiopians quickly established contact with black churches in the United States. The rapid Catholic expansion into tropical Africa which marked the closing decades of the nineteenth century was a direct consequence of the major reorganisation achieved earlier in the century.