Colonization and Christianity

Colonization and Christianity (1838) is a forceful indictment of European empire, tracing the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific under Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British rule. Written as a ‘popular history,‘ it combines documentary citation, moral rhetoric, and narrative compression to expose conquest, dispossession, forced labour, and missionary complicity. In the reformist context of post-abolition Britain, Howitt turns Christian language against colonial practice, making the book both historical survey and prophetic denunciation. William Howitt, an English writer, historian, and reformer from a Quaker milieu, was deeply shaped by dissenting Christianity and humanitarian politics. Known with his wife Mary Howitt for literary and educational work, he brought to this study a Nonconformist‘s suspicion of state power and a moralist‘s insistence that national greatness be judged by conduct toward the vulnerable. The book‘s anger reflects not abstract theory but a conscience sharpened by abolitionist and evangelical reform debates. This volume is essential for readers interested in colonial history, Christian ethics, Indigenous studies, and nineteenth-century radical prose. It should be read not merely as a period polemic but as an early, influential challenge to imperial self-congratulation. Howitt‘s pages remain unsettling, eloquent, and morally clarifying.