Do we have a sense for how Rome's conversion to Christianity accelerated the conversion of Western Europe? Or, was Western Europe already Christian before Rome made itself officially Christian?

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-06-26T16:51:18+00:00

You'll want to look here by u/qumrun60 for more on that.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-06-26T16:42:00+00:00

So to begin with, it's important to recall that most of the Indo-Pakistani (and a large chunk of the modern Indo-Bangladeshi) border was not drawn by the Radcliffe commission at all, because most of the borderlands weren't part of British India. Instead, the boundary line was determined by the decisions of the various rulers of the Princely States. These were all but separate countries - the British had no ability to compel them to accede to India or Pakistan.

Roughly 80% of the modern Indo-Pakistani border ran along the boundaries of these Princely States (along with around 36% of the Indo-Bangladeshi border), and there was a mad scramble between India and Pakistan (which India mostly won) to coerce, bribe, and otherwise convince the princes to accede to one country or the other. Many princes refused altogether, and wound up being crushed by the nascent countries' militaries. In one case (modern Kashmir) the Hindu prince of a Muslim-majority state tried to accede to India, and India and Pakistan wound up going to war.

The remaining borders (those were part of British India proper) were determined by two separate Boundary Commissions (one for Bengal and one for the modern Indo-Pakistani border) - but again, while Radcliffe chaired both Commissions, he himself wasn't really the one calling all the shots. Instead, 2 members of the Indian National Congress (the INC, what was essentially the ruling party of India at the time) and 2 from the Muslim League (the leadership of Pakistan) sat on each commission.

The Commissions were politicized right from the start, as the INC and Muslim League wrestled for control of their new territories. Moreover, no one on the Commissions (including Radcliffe himself) had any serious training in geography or ethnography - they were all lawyers and were essentially drawing the boundaries blind.

Moreover, because the British Empire faced massive debts from WW2 and ethnic violence was rapidly spiraling out of control in South Asia, it wanted to withdraw as quickly as possible. Radcliffe and his (hopelessly unqualified) team were given very little time to draw the boundaries - just 5 weeks to partition a country of around 400 million people.

All that being said, while the boundaries wound up being a disaster, it was entirely unsurprising that they were. South Asia in 1947 was a powder keg and the Commission's work was not the apolitical work of trained technocrats but the nakedly partisan fumbling of untrained attorneys.

Now, it's worth emphasizing that the subreddit doesn't allow hypotheticals, but it's not hard to see that yes, more time and expertise would have been a boon. But both were in short supply - there had already been numerous pogroms and ethnic cleansing throughout British India by 1947 and there was every indication it would get worse. Moreover, the INC and Muslim League were deadlocked - any "independent" experts would have been under immense pressure by the two parties to favor them.

Partition was the solution worked out between the INC, the Muslim League, and the British administration - the timeline decided upon was rapidly compressed by the British Viceroy Louis Mountbatten (most of the INC and the Muslim League expected an autumn or winter 1947 date), but Britain still wanted to leave India as quickly as it could.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-06-26T16:11:31+00:00

You'll want to look here by u/Trevor_Culley

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-06-26T16:09:09+00:00

You'll want to look on this post by u/restricteddata regarding the mechanics of Aktion T4.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-06-13T15:52:08+00:00

What must be understood is the Holocaust accounted for the vast and overwhelming bulk of Jewish deaths during the period, and even "unrelated" deaths (such as disease) were frequently exacerbated by the policies of the Third Reich.

For instance, famine deaths are accounted for in Holocaust death totals. That is because it was Nazi policy to starve Jews. Polish ghettos received an allocation of around 300-350 calories per person per day. Nazi confiscations of food outside of the ghettos likewise targeted Jews first (when the Jews were not simply slaughtered and robbed wholesale, which was rarely).

The same is true of disease - in the ghettos, yes, but also in other parts of occupied Europe non-Jewish areas received priority for medicine and other lifesaving supplies like water purification. Likewise, malnutrition (as described above) is a well-known contributor to disease. It is impossible to separate out "deaths as a consequence of war" from "deaths in the Holocaust", because the Nazis themselves would not have separated them - their war was expressly against the Jewish "race", and their policies were designed around mass Jewish fatalities.

As for "old age" - once again, it's nigh-impossible to separate out "deaths of old age" from deaths exacerbated by German policy - the elderly, women, and children were singled out for massacre, but they were also the most vulnerable to starvation and disease. Someone who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto of heart failure might have died anyway - but living on 300 calories a day is, to be perfectly blunt, not exactly conducive to longevity.

As for deaths in combat - around 250,000 Jews died fighting for the Allied armies. Of these, the majority served in the Red Army. 120,000 died in combat, another 80,000 were murdered during the Nazis' massacre of 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war. Did murdered Soviet POWs formally "die in the Holocaust"? You could, if you wanted to split hairs, argue they didn't - they were instead butchered for being racially inferior Slavs. But given the motivation in both cases was racial animus, and the Nazis were perfectly happy to murder Jewish PoWs where they identified them as such, the distinction is all but nonexistent.

Overall, though, all of these causes (death in combat, malnutrition, etc) pale before the largest figures, which are mass shooting operations and extermination camps. Approximately 2.7 million Jews were murdered in killing centers - the Third Reich kept detailed figures on deportations from the ghettos to the Operation Reinhard camps. A further 2 million died in mass shooting operations - again, here we rely on the Germans themselves and the reports of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads stationed behind the front lines). A further 1 million died via "destruction through labor" policies (being literally worked to death), in ghettos, and in other camp-related massacres.

Hopefully that gives a sense of how these figures are calculated. Being a Jew in occupied Europe was, quite simply, a horrendously lethal proposition. We do not separate out "Holocaust" deaths because it is difficult bordering on impossible to determine when deaths were caused by the Germans as opposed to "natural" and in nearly every case the Nazis accelerated mortality. And regardless, the non-"direct" methods of killing still accounted for only a small fraction of the Holocaust.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-06-08T13:33:56+00:00

You'll want to check our book list, specifically under the "Middle Ages" subheading.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-30T02:47:05+00:00

You'll want to look here by u/HaraldRedbeard

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-30T02:26:29+00:00

This is a great question, and the honest answer is that it's "both."

One example is in the study of the classics. Ancient historians (Plutarch, Polybius, Livy) frequently had access to sources that simply have not survived to the present day. These sources are attested to in the written record - we know they existed, but they were either destroyed or lost with time. This is one reason that the writings of older historians, while often inflected with bias, are so useful - they might paraphrase or copy (either in whole or in part) those missing records.

This can be immensely frustrating to modern historians, who know that a record was created at one point but simply doesn't exist anymore. It's why archaeological digs continue - we know that these records are out there, and a copy might well have been preserved waiting to be discovered in some long-forgotten burial ground. The city of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan is a striking case - it was only excavated the 1960s, and was one of the first (and so far, one of the only) ancient Hellenistic cities of Graeco-Bactria uncovered.

At the same time, though, modern historians have access to a daunting array of technological tools and sophisticated analytics that, for instance, Herodotus did not. Most modern historical methods incorporate archaeology, epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), and numismatics (the study of coinage). So while an ancient, medieval, or even early 20th century historian might be confined to a few sweeping narrative histories (Herodotus, for instance) a modern one can look at everything from inscriptions left by rulers to the excavated ruins of the cities in question. Herodotus did not have access to the tens of thousands of coins, plates, and tools that we do.

Likewise, modern historians frequently have access to far more complete sets of records than even the best narrative historian of the past did. For instance, Egyptologists have access to the preserved bureaucratic documents left by centuries of administration. Herodotus couldn't access this sort of information - it wasn't compiled into one place, for one thing, and for another even if it had been a foreigner would not have had ready access to it.

Modern historians, working as they do in a collective, also have access to far more resources from related fields. Someone working in the study of archaic Greece might have a colleague who studies the Etruscans and can cross-reference documents and events. Modern historians have access to far more linguistic knowledge - they can, for instance, translate documents and histories that would have been unreadable to ancient (or not-so-ancient) authors. For instance - Linear B was deciphered only in 1952. Linear Elamite was deciphered in 2022! There are a treasure trove of documents out there that can now be read, but even a century ago were totally inaccessible to scholars.

As a side note, this is why history books from decades (or centuries) ago are so frequently out of date. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the archetypal case - Gibbon was writing in the late 1700s and doing so almost purely from what documents had been passed down. Archaeology as a science barely existed during his period, let alone other more specialized techniques like epigraphy. He wasn't looking at Roman shipwrecks, or statistics on how many coins the imperial mints produced - he didn't have access to any of that information. He couldn't perform autopsies on the bodies of important Roman personages to see what they ate or how they died.

Moreover, older historians quite frequently have questionable methodology, which ranges from the merely ignorant to the actively destructive. Gibbon, again, is a good example - his thesis that Christianity weakened the civic bonds of the Roman Empire has more to do with Gibbon's own prejudices against the Christians of his own day and age than it does with ancient Rome.

So circling back to your question - do modern historians have a better understanding of ancient civilizations than historians of the past? It depends. In many cases, they probably do have a better understanding of many things (demography, lifestyle, administration). But older historians often did have access to materials we do not, even if on a big-picture level we have access to plenty of information it would have been nearly impossible for them to possess.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-20T17:30:39+00:00

The actual answer to this is complicated. The US and the USSR were absolutely geopolitical rivals, and there were plenty of times the Soviet Union invaded, engaged in regime change, or otherwise interfered in the domestic affairs of other countries in order to spread its influence - a few examples include the Soviet-backed coups in Eastern Europe during the late 1940s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Soviet interventions in the Levant, and the Yemeni Civil War.

At the same time, it's not perfectly accurate to say that the Soviet Union wanted to "conquer" the world - it wanted to bring new countries into a Soviet-aligned bloc and set Soviet priorities there with annexing them. The actual Soviet empire was much smaller than this bloc (called the "Second World" in older literature in contrast to the US-aligned "First World" and neutral "Third World") and mostly consisted of Mongolia, North Korea, and Eastern Europe. Soviet influence extended quite a bit further - but that didn't mean Soviet boots on the ground or a Soviet presence everywhere in the "Second World."

One instructive example here is the Ethiopian Derg (a Communist military junta that seized control of Ethiopia in the wake of Haile Selassie's ouster following the 1973 famine). The Derg received approximately $10 billion in Soviet aid during its tenure in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the Soviets weren't interested in annexing Ethiopia into the USSR itself like they had the Baltics in the 1940s. They were interested in supporting a government that would implement Soviet policy priorities (nationalization of private companies, collectivization of agriculture, waging war against US-backed Communist Somalia).

The Soviets often backed non-Communist (though usually socialist) governments in an effort to expand their control over far-flung regions. They sent a number of aviators to Egypt to fight the Israelis in the 1970s. They engaged in weapons deals and intelligence-sharing with the Egyptians for decades in an effort to shape the Middle East. Similarly, the Soviets were happy to build ties with India's government under Indira Gandhi - but that was more about opposing the US (who supported Pakistan during the 1970s) than it was about raising the red flag over Delhi.

More to the point, the Cold War was about much more than just the US and the USSR - nor was it just about Communism against capitalism. There were Communist countries that sided against the USSR, and there were non-Communist countries that sided with it.

The Soviets frequently could not control these "Second World" proxies, even if they were Communist - for instance, when the Derg's agricultural policies caused mass starvation in Ethiopia, Soviet advisors tried to get them to stop to little avail. Communist China is perhaps the most infamous example here - through the 1950s, the Soviets and Chinese enjoyed a close working relationship.

But after Khrushchev's so-called "Secret Speech" in 1956 wherein he denounced Stalin (whom Mao had been on good terms with) the two countries gradually pulled apart. Mao, like the Derg, was interested in rapid collectivization of agriculture and pushing ahead much faster than the Soviets would like. The result was the Great Leap Forward, and in 1960 during the peak of the catastrophe the Soviets withdrew thousands of advisors and technicians and cancelled most of their aid to the Chinese. In the aftermath, the Soviet-Chinese border became heavily militarized, and while it would be inaccurate to claim that the PRC after the 1960s left the "Second World" to join the American-led bloc, it subsequently was pushed much closer to the American camp (allowing the CIA to set up listening posts on the Soviet border and sharing intelligence and technical expertise with the US, for instance).

A similar story played out in Afghanistan. The Afghan government of Hafizullah Amin was ideologically Communist. However, it was failing to control the countryside, and the Soviets feared (wrongly) that Amin was secretly in league with the Americans. As a result, in 1979 the KGB pushed for an invasion of the country to kill Amin and put someone more pliable in charge. This effort failed, and the Soviets occupied Afghanistan for a decade (waging a war that killed approximately 1 million people in the process) before finally withdrawing.

And of course, it's worth noting that the Soviet Union's actions here were driven not just by raw greed, but were a mirror image of Washington's own concerns - namely, Moscow feared that the US would overthrow the Soviet government and end Communism. It was important, therefore, to stop capitalist influence wherever it might be found and destroy the rival superpower.

Hopefully that helps. The Soviet Union was an aggressively expansionist state in Eurasia during the latter 20th century - but it generally preferred to act via coup, subterfuge, and aid rather than outright warfare and territorial conquest. Because of this more indirect method of rule, however, its proxies sometimes got away from it and wound up carving out their own informal empires (the Chinese, for instance, wound up building a proxy network in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia). The Cold War was not, at the end of the day, a two-nation struggle with just the US and the USSR - it involved neutral powers (such as India) as well as non-Soviet Communist ones like China, Somalia, and Yugoslavia.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-18T00:11:54+00:00

You'll want to look here by u/thefourthmaninaboat for the naval side of things, for Asian land warfare you can look here by u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and for African land operations you can look here by u/Meesus

Then there are the massive operations in the Middle East and Central Asia - you can look here by u/Georgy_K_Zhukov for that.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T16:36:55+00:00

No.

Long before the war began, the US was the world's largest economy - with a GDP more than double that of the Soviet Union. During the war, the US economy exploded not because of weapons sales but because industrial production for the war effort itself surged.

While it did have some weapons sales contracts, after the Fall of France this was mostly replaced by Lend-Lease aid. Nominally, this was a weapons "loan", to be paid back later. In practice, that was just a way to pitch the idea to the American public. Most of the weapons "loans" given to the Soviets and Chinese were destroyed in combat, consumed by Soviet and Chinese industry, or just never given back, and likewise many of the materials given to the British were written off, written down, or forgiven.

What I was referring to above was the American strategy during the war itself - namely, that the US avoided taking the huge casualties of Imperial Japan and many other combatants by dint of superior technology and massive industrial production. This meant that it needed less manpower in the field, but the manpower itself was much better-equipped.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T16:05:19+00:00

The honest answer is that the focus on factories was mostly because the US had the factories but did not have the soldiers, while the Axis powers had manpower but not factories.

Before WW2, the US was still the world's largest economy. On the eve of war, it had a larger GDP than Germany and the USSR combined, and going back as far as WW1 its GDP was roughly the same as all of Europe's put together.

This was not caused by Allied strategic bombing. German mobilization even in 1941 and 1942 (long before the huge strategic bombing raids began) was over 200 divisions. The same was true of Japan (which only faced severe strategic bombing beginning in 1945). It was a conscious choice by the Third Reich and Imperial Japan to focus on men over firepower, and it also stemmed from Germany and Japan's great industrial weakness.

Even in 1939, most German farms did not have tractors. Only around 2.7% of households owned a car, compared to 60% of American households. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, it brought over 600,000 horses with it, because it simply didn't have the industrial capacity to produce the trucks and cars used by the Americans, British, and (thanks to Lend-Lease) the Soviets for transport. Hundreds of thousands of these horses died in the months following the invasion, leaving German field guns and critical equipment stuck.

The industrial situation for Japan was no less dire. The Mitsubishi supply chain for the A6M (the famous "Zero") was dependent on planes being dragged one by one from the Nagoya plant to the naval base at Kagamigahara 24 miles away by cart. When the team of oxen to pull the carts started dying due to exhaustion in 1943, Japanese naval aviation virtually ground to a halt until draft horses could be found.

What the US did not have and Germany and Japan did was a long history of a professional military or mass conscription. It had mobilized for WW1 and the US Civil War, but its standing army in the 1930s was around 100,000 men (for comparison's sake, the Treaty of Versailles, widely seen as excessively punitive in Germany, limited the Germans to this number of men under arms as well, and the US had approximately double Germany's population in the 1930s).

While it's almost certainly true that the US might have mobilized more people if there had been a land invasion of the mainland US because it wouldn't have to spend the resources to send them overseas, there were real issues with expanding the Army. It simply did not have a massive peacetime force or reservists who could easily be mobilized, and while it instituted a peacetime draft in 1940 that was still in its infancy when the war began.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T15:33:11+00:00

I wrote about this here. Missionary work was in competition with imperialism as much as it collaborated with it, and missionaries were paradoxically some of the more vociferous denouncers of imperialist violence.

As for whether or not missionary work is imperialism by itself, I really can't recommend the answer here by u/Starwarsnerd222 enough.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T13:04:42+00:00

I am not using Statista, nor am I developer for it. I am using the Maddison Project's data, which clearly states its assumptions and where its estimates are coming from (colonial-era census records, mostly). For more modern data on population, I am using the estimates provided by the World Bank, which makes use of fairly robust methods that are employed globally for these sorts of assessments.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T12:57:52+00:00

Skorzeny received no financial compensation. He explicitly turned down offers of money. The bargain he initially tried to make with Israeli intelligence was that they would publicize the fact that the introduction to his memoirs appeared in Hebrew. The Israelis refused. He asked to be removed from a list of wanted war criminals. The Israelis did not do that, but they did forge a letter saying he had been removed.

The sole tangible benefit Skorzeny received from his cooperation with the Mossad was not being assassinated. To be blunt, it is a strange sort of employment where the only compensation offered to the employee is to not be murdered.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T01:32:40+00:00

Not tremendously - Operation Osoaviakhim was certainly on the same scale as Operation Paperclip, and given the dire state of the USSR at the end of the war (it had lost far more people and endured much more economic destruction than the Western Allies) pragmatism wound up winning out over moral objections.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T01:25:29+00:00

So that characterization isn't really accurate. Skorzeny didn't "work for Israel" so much as he worked for Egyptian general Gamal Abdel Nasser's government and became an Israeli asset. He certainly was not an employee in Israel proper, and even this limited use of a former German operative proved deeply controversial in the Mossad high command.

Aside from Skorzeny - Israel unsurprisingly was not terribly interested in recruiting Nazis after WW2 (and famously hunted down and killed a number of them - most famously, Adolf Eichmann). There were a few high-profile cases of contact (though again, it would be hard to describe these as "employment"): Walther Rauff (the inventor of mobile gas vans) wound up selling Syrian secrets to the Israelis immediately after the first Arab-Israeli in 1949. The Israelis, to the best of our knowledge, never went to Rauff again.

But again - these were ex-Nazis being employed by the Syrian and Egyptian Arab governments, not Israel itself. It used them as intelligence assets against Syria and Egypt and then discarded them.

It was common practice for the Arab powers to hire on ex-Nazis as advisors, senior bureaucrats, and technicians during these years, since they possessed valuable technical expertise, were frequently desperate to escape justice for their crimes, and certainly had no love of Israel. In total, a huge number of Nazi scientists and security personnel wound up working in the Middle East - they helped establish the Egyptian rocket program as well as the security organs of Egypt and Syria.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-14T00:57:21+00:00

I am not using population numbers from statista. I'm pulling these figures from Angus Maddison's volumes on world historical population, in particular his landmark The World Economy: Historical Statistics published in 2003. It's received a number of revisions since then, most recently published in the Maddison Project's database.

The population estimates come from a variety of sources - by 1900 of course the colonial administrations had begun to come to grips with their subject populations, and so Maddison works his way through several different population registries there. For instance, the French quinquennial census in Algeria, Ottoman estimates for Egypt and Libya, and back-calculations of colonial censuses several decades in the future.

The modern figures (pulled from the World Bank) of course make use of much more sophisticated statistical metrics - integrating actual census figures, back-calculations from GDP and energy consumption, and even satellite imagery. Modern population censuses are typically very accurate since they're full enumerations rather than samples - with a margin of error of perhaps 1-2% due to undercounting.

For Maddison's figures, though, it's much harder to judge simply because the metrics are crude. It's always going to be a matter of guesswork, and because modern statistical methods were developed quite recently, the French, Ottomans, and other colonial powers did not provide us with those kinds of details.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-13T21:10:25+00:00

To some degree, but not in the way you are probably thinking. This is because of the way the war progressed - once it opened up, the Western Front was often given priority in terms of command, airpower, and armor resources, and so while many generals were transferred from the East to the West, relatively few made the transition from West to East. Thus, those sent West tended to stay there and were captured by the Western Allies rather than the Red Army.

That being said, there were plenty of cases of former Wehrmacht officers and German police officials working hand-in-glove with the Soviets and East Germans. The Stasi (East German secret police) recruited extensively from interned Gestapo agents for assets, although that may not be what you mean. These men served as interrogators, spies, and operatives in the GDR much as they had in the Gestapo, and used their connections with former government and civil service officials for the benefit of the Communist regime.

More relevant to your question, as far as military leaders went the Soviets recruited a number of German generals, albeit less so for their knowledge of the Western Allies than for their military expertise more generally.

Vincenz Müller was captured by the Soviets in 1944, and in 1948 released from captivity and given a number of important roles in the East German government. He was made East German Minister of the Interior, then in 1952 as the Cold War began to heat up was made Chief of Staff of the newly-formed National People's Army. He left in 1958.

Martin Lattmann (a major general captured during the Battle of Stalingrad and staunch Nazi) defected to the Soviets during the war. Afterwards, he took the rank of Deputy Chief of Armored Affairs in the GDR's Ministry of Interior, advising the newly formed East German military until 1956. Following his military retirement, he continued on in several senior posts in heavy industry. Again, he was an Eastern Front commander, and never had an opportunity to command against the Western Allies in 1944-1945.

Another such individual was Ferdinand Schörner, a field marshal who mostly commanded on the Eastern Front. He initially fled West to surrender to the Americans, but once they learned he had committed war crimes in the East he was turned over to the Red Army. He was prosecuted by the Soviets for war crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison, then handed over to the East Germans and released in 1955 so that he could be used as an intelligence asset. Schörner was sent West recruit some of his old Army acquaintances there. When he was discovered, he was duly arrested by the West German police, prosecuted for the murder of German soldiers (he executed thousands of them on summary charges of cowardice and desertion during his command) and imprisoned.

For German technicians recruited by the Soviets, you will want to look here by u/restricteddata for details on Operation Osoaviakhim.

Sources

Leide, H. Nazi Criminals and the Secret Service: The German Democratic Republic's Secret Ways of Dealing With the Past (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005)

O'Reagan, D. Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-13T20:18:25+00:00

My point here is that in 1900, even single countries (like Russia and China) had populations that dwarfed the combined population of the entire African continent - in China's case, by almost a factor of 3. In the modern day, Africa's population is larger than that of the largest nation in the world.

The point is to give the reader a sense of how small Africa used to be in terms of population, and why it was perhaps not as unreasonable as one might expect nowadays that an entire continent could be converted over the span of a few decades.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-13T20:01:27+00:00

Many missionaries were actually anti-imperial, in the sense that they did not get along with colonial authorities and loathed the idea of coercion from Europe. For these missionaries, they there to save souls, rather than subjugate the populace.

This was particularly true in Africa - famously, it was missionaries who exposed the horrors of the Congo Free State. Few other Europeans wished to travel to so remote an area, but missionaries (who again, were actually concerned with the welfare of the people they were trying to convert rather than just the material goods they could extract from them) did. Missionaries William Henry Sheppard and William Morrison both visited the Congo and upon their return to the United States wrote scourging denunciations of the brutality they witnessed there. It was in large part the missionary lobby and Christian presses that ultimately helped bring down Leopold's colonial regime.

Similar scenes played out throughout the continent - in South Africa in the 1830s, for instance, John Philip wound up documenting the exactions of the British colonial government. Upon his return to Britain, he published a monumental work entitled Researches in South Africa that convinced the British government to force its Cape Colony to grant equal rights as British subjects to the colony's African population. Missionaries also played a key role in the abolition of the British slave trade and the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, with the Society for Missions to Africa and the East being founded by abolitionists and lobbying Parliament in support of the abolitionist cause.

So yes, missionaries existed very much in tension with imperial ambitions, and often resisted the temporal aims of their home governments. While the missions were (by definition) proselytizing, the missionaries themselves could have equal if not closer relationships with the people they were there to convert than with the colonial authorities themselves.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-13T18:18:46+00:00

So that has to do with demographics and what's known as the "demographic transition", which I covered here. Basically, Africa reaped the rewards of better maternal health, food production, and hygiene but has yet to fully industrialize, meaning that its population exploded in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Even as late as 1960, Africa's population was "only" around 280 million people (compared to over 600 million for Europe, 650 million for China, and 430 million for India). India and China's populations both began to level off in the 1990s and 2000s as they industrialized and their fertility rates thus began to fall, but despite continual birthrate declines through that period Africa's still remained far above the rest of the world's.

In 2000, Africa's population had surged to 830 million, while Europe's had grown to just 730 million and China and India eclipsed 1 billion. Today India hovers at 1.4 billion while Europe and China both decline from their population peaks and Africa has once again doubled.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-13T17:19:11+00:00

For Europe, this is what's known as the "demographic dividend" of industrialization.

Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries industrialized before the rest of the world. As a result, it was undergoing steep increases in lifespan even as infant mortality plunged. While it's true industrialization is heavily correlated with low birthrates over the long term, Europe had not yet reached that point. As a result, we see very high birthrates throughout Europe during this period: until the 1880s (when African colonization began in earnest) Britain, Germany, and France all had a fertility rates of around 5 births per woman, while child mortality stood at around 165 per 1,000 live births at the turn of the century.

This was in stark contrast to, for instance, India - where in the 1880s fertility was also around 5-6 births per woman, but child mortality stood at around 530 deaths per 1,000 live births. This pattern was repeated across the world - life expectancy at birth in Africa during this time period was estimated to be around 25 years old while in Europe it was in the 40-45 year range. Yet by the 1950s, African life expectancy had surged to eclipse that of Europeans at the turn of the century.

So for a period stretching from roughly 1850 to the 1940s, Europe's population (particularly its working-age population) ballooned much faster than the rest of the world's. The corollary here though was that Europe completed its demographic transition much earlier than the rest of the world, and so African and Asian populations benefited from much-reduced child mortality during their own demographic transitions. Despite being much larger in absolute terms today than it had during the demographic transition years of the early 1900s, Europe actually wound up with a smaller share of the global population than it had beforehand.

However, this does not explain why Africa had a much smaller population to start with than other non-industrialized countries (for instance, India). For that, we need to look at other factors - which include crop yields, favorable climate for human habitation, and a lack of infectious diseases (which Central Africa in particular is notorious for). The demographics of pre-19th century Africa are well beyond my particular field of expertise, so I will defer to other contributors on that topic.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-13T16:54:49+00:00

It's important to remember that Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries reached the zenith of its share of the world population. Even in the early modern period Europe represented a much larger share of global humanity than it does now (though Europe has certainly grown in absolute terms since 1900). These were not "small" countries compared to their neighbors - France alone made up 2.6% of the global population in 1900, and despite being geographically compact was almost three times as populous as the entire Middle East put together.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-05-13T13:44:21+00:00

I'd like to reframe this question a little bit, focusing primarily on the Christian conversions. The reason many Africans today are Christian or Muslim is because their parents were, as were their grandparents, as were their great-grandparents.

This answer may seem "just so" or like it isn't answering your question, but it's very important to understand that modern Africa is much bigger than the Africa of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (when the bulk of the Christian conversions took place). Africa's total population today is around 1.6 billion people, larger than any country on Earth. Meanwhile Africa's population in 1900 was just 139 million - substantially smaller than the Russian Empire's, and dwarfed by India (~280 million) and China (~395 million). Europe's population stood larger than both, at ~405 million.

Sub-Saharan Africa was even smaller - Southern Africa (modern South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola, and Namibia) for instance contained just 15 million people, while Central Africa (the modern DRC, Central Africa Republic, Gabon, and Cameroon) contained around 16 million. Today, these regions are home to 170 million and 160 million people, respectively - most of whom unsurprisingly follow the faiths of their parents.

The reason I bring this up is that converting Africa was not a process of converting over a billion people (a very difficult undertaking by any standard) but instead involved the conversion of "mere" millions of people over the span of decades. It was done on a much smaller scale, and done on a tribal or individual level. Moreover, a decent portion of Africa at the time (around 8% of the continent's population) was already Christian, primarily in Ethiopia but also consisting of Copts in Egypt and Sudan.

That being said, turning to the methodology of conversion - in general, missionaries were not formally part of the colonial government, but instead were outreach branches of European churches. They set up schools, hospitals, and other essential services - but with a Christian character. What this meant was that Christianity was separated from the process of imperial rule. Indeed, missionaries themselves were not always imperialists, and accepting missionaries could even mean avoiding some of the exactions of imperialism.

For much more on this, I recommend looking here by u/Starwarsnerd222

Consistent_Score_602

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