William Carey Sails for India

The event

William Carey, a largely self-educated English shoemaker who had taught himself classical and biblical languages while pursuing his trade, published in 1792 An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, arguing against the then-common view among many contemporary Baptists that the Great Commission's obligation to evangelize the world applied only to the apostolic generation, and insisting instead that the obligation remained active for every generation of Christians.

Carey's pamphlet directly led to the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society later that year, and in 1793 Carey himself sailed for India, settling eventually in the Danish colonial enclave of Serampore near Calcutta, where Danish rather than restrictive British East India Company authority allowed him greater freedom to pursue missionary and educational work.

Over more than four decades in India without ever returning to England, Carey and his colleagues at Serampore translated the Bible, in whole or substantial part, into numerous Indian languages, founded Serampore College in 1818 as one of India's first institutions granting academic degrees, and engaged extensively in botanical science, agricultural improvement, and social reform, including sustained advocacy against the practice of sati (the ritual immolation of widows), which British colonial authorities eventually formally banned in Bengal in 1829, an outcome to which Carey's advocacy substantially contributed.

Carey's combination of linguistic scholarship, educational institution-building, and sustained long-term commitment to a single mission field established a widely emulated model for subsequent nineteenth-century Protestant missionary work, and his 1793 departure is frequently cited by historians as a symbolic launching point for the great wave of organized Protestant foreign missions that followed over the following century, though earlier Protestant missionary efforts, including Moravian missions, had preceded him.

Other witnesses

• William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792)

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 36: William Carey and the Great Missions Century — free full issue