Global Bible: British and German Bible Societies Translating Colonialism, 1800-1914.

The Global Bible project (GloBil) aims to critically investigate British and German contributions to the creation of a global bible, that is the attempt to translate Christian scripture into all the languages of the world. By early in the twentieth century, some portion of the bible had been translated into approximately 1000 languages, including many with no previous written form. This astonishing achievement was the cultural equivalent of the moon landing, or the mapping of the human genome, and continues to the present day. As a result of decades of arduous labour, much of what is known about global majority languages relies on the work of Indigenous translators and missionary linguists from the colonial era. Yet much of this critical knowledge remains obscured in religious archives.

GloBil will unlock the archives of German and British bible societies, uncovering the history of the global bible movement and its discovery of global languages. To provide focus and direction, GloBil will explore bible translation in three geographically diverse regions, namely the Arctic, Oceania and Australia, and West Africa. These regions are significant because they illustrate the different frontiers into which British and German colonisers were moving and the range of encounters with unique and distinctive languages and peoples. GloBil seeks to delineate the global bible movement in these three regions, uncovering the contribution of Indigenous translators and evangelists, and the significant contribution of British and German bible societies.

Bible societies were key to the dissemination of British and German soft power, both at home and abroad, though their significance and global importance has, until now, received little recognition. In the UK, the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) was a cultural power house which funded the dissemination, publication and distribution of bibles to the peoples of the world. The BFBS worked in partnership with other bible societies and a host of missionary societies in the field, who together sought to give written form to the languages of the world, beginning with those in contact zones at the leading edge of colonial expansion. At every point, it was supported by German societies, with funds, linguistic expertise and missionaries and personnel who shared a common evangelical and pietistic world view. While the missionary movement and the contribution of German missionaries to British missionary societies is relatively well understood, GloBil will uncover the significance of Anglo-German collaboration to funding, publishing and disseminating global bible knowledge.

Research has been divided into six work packages, each with a dedicated team with the linguistic and research skills required to access bible society and missionary records in Germany and the UK. Work packages includes both global majority and European-based scholars and artists who will collaborate in tackling the research questions.

The project is committed to foregrounding the repatriation of colonial knowledge of Indigenous languages. It will achieve this through innovative presentation of research results, collaboration with Indigenous scholars and artists and contemporary heirs to colonial bible language communities. By creating a wide range of outputs in different media, it will engage and reach beyond the academic community. These outputs include: 1. The GloBil database, which will include the map of the Global Bible movement, 2. the GloBil conference, with contributions from Africa, Oceania, the UK and Germany including artists and academics and 3. the GloBil exhibition, which will be hosted by the Bible Museum Münster, who will produce a catalogue as a partner contribution to the project. The exhibition will provide a forum for post-colonial reflection by communities served by the bibles exhibited, demonstrating the reception and afterlives of bible translations from the colonial era.