"An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens" by William Carey became an important piece of religious literature for Protestant missionaries who aimed to teach their faith and convert people in colonized countries across the globe. Though the book itself would likely be considered insensitive and perhaps even radical today, it is nonetheless important to read about these uncomfortable parts of history in order to avoid repeating them.

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the nineteenth century. This process took place within a unified field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects – those constituencies that were seen as the most threatening to imperial progress. Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population were inscribed within discourses of western civilization as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, of which a legacy still remains. Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history this comparative study seeks to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination.

Excerpt from An Enquiry Into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens Recognition of Carey's greatness has grown with the years. We marvel at his daring and fortitude, at the magnitude of his work as a translator of the Scriptures and as an educator, at the far-sightedness of his missionary planning, at his ecumenical spirit. Not a little of the secret of what he achieved and what he was may be found in the pages of the Enquiry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.