While Christian evangelization and conversion were often the primary justifications for imperial expansion in the early modern Atlantic world, the meaning of the word "conversion" remains contested among scholars, particularly when used to refer to non-European conversion to Christianity. Several historians have argued that the term "conversion" simplifies a complex process and reiterates a missionary mindset. This article surveys a variety of alternatives to the word "conversion," including syncretism, hybridity, affiliation, appropriation, and practice. While assessing the benefits and drawbacks of each of these terms, it argues that discarding the word "conversion" risks minimizing or overlooking the experiences of non-European converts. Instead, it is more accurate to say that conversionfor both Europeans and non-Europeanswas a process of transformation that occurred on multiple planes. The social, cultural, and political implications are easier to identify in the historical record, but historians also need to take seriously the possibility of religious transformation as well.In order to do so, this essay draws on literature from the fields of anthropology and religious studies to identify two methods that can be particularly useful for describing non-European conversion: first, an emphasis on "lived religion" can help historians move past the misconception that Christianity is a bound system. By focusing on practice rather than doctrine, it de-centers missionaries and seeks, instead, to examine religious practice from the "bottom up." Second, interrogating the process of translation has great potential for historians of conversion, particularly during a period of colonial encounter. By exploring how Christian terms were redefined through their translation into non-European languages, historians will gain better insight into the cosmologies, beliefs, and practices of Native Americans and Africans. By using these methodsand recognizing that the meaning of "conversion" is, and always has been, in f luxhistorians can move past the "missionary mindset" and acknowledge the significance of the choice that many non-Europeans made to engage in Christian rites.

They call me Obea" examines the role of obeah within the Moravian mission to Jamaica between 1754 and 1760. While much scholarship has focused on the significance of obeah in Tacky's Revolt of 1760 and later, there has been less attention paid to obeah before it became linked to rebellion and criminalized in British West Indian law. The Moravian missionary sources, a voluminous yet largely unexamined archive of letters, diaries, and account books written by Moravian missionaries and their enslaved and free converts, offer new insight into the significance of obeah in pre-1760 Jamaica. When Zacharias George Caries, the first Moravian missionary to be stationed in Jamaica, arrived in 1754, he was an outsider on many levels. A German Moravian who had toured with the evangelist John Cennick through the British Isles, Caries brought with him a radical vision of the New Birth and a commitment to converting enslaved Africans to Christianity. Three months after his arrival, the enslaved men and women at the Bogue estate began to call Caries "obea," a term that Caries defined as a "Seer, or one who is able to see things in the future." What did it mean for Caries to be called "obea," and how did his behavior contribute to the perception that he was an obeah man? I argue that Caries' identification as an obeah man demonstrates that obeah was not just an Afro-Caribbean practiceit was also the frame through which Afro-Caribbeans interpreted European religious and medical practices. Several scholars have argued persuasively that obeah conflicts with European methods of categorization that divide "religion" from "medicine" and "true religion" from "superstition." This article contends that in order to fully appreciate the role of obeah in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica, scholars must view Christian practice and European natural history as being part of the Afro-Caribbean category of obeah.

"Antislavery in Print" reexamines the first two North American antislavery petitions in terms of colonial print culture and Quaker politics. It also argues that there is an authorial link between these two important texts. The first antislavery protest was composed in 1688 by German-Dutch immigrants in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and was circulated in manuscript form within the Quaker community. The second document, the Exhortation and Caution to Friends concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes , was published by William Bradford in 1693 and has been widely attributed to George Keith, a schismatic Quaker who was expelled from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1692. This essay argues that the Exhortation should not be ascribed solely to Keith. It was a communal effort that should be attributed to the Christian Quakers, the splinter group founded by Keith. The Christian Quakers were nonelite English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German, and Dutch Quakers, a number of whom were directly involved in the creation of the Germantown Protest. Keith himself never expressed radical antislavery sentiments, either before or after the publication of the Exhortation , but he did play an important role in arranging for its publication. Once printed, however, the Exhortation lost credibility within the orthodox Philadelphia Quaker community because it became part of a polemical print war that George Keith was waging against the orthodox Quakers.

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