Education was an instrument in Christian missions' and colonial powers' civilisation projects. At the same time, education was also instrumental in fostering opposition. This article approaches perceptions of education mainly from the perspective of Norwegian Lutheran missionaries in French colonial Madagascar during the 1940s. The focus is on how…

Drawing on perspectives from sociocultural theory, this article investigates how Christian denominations are represented in Norwegian textbooks of religious education and by young believers. The main finding is that textbooks and young adherents present religion in substantially different ways. While textbooks relate religion to global and…

This paper explores comparatively and historically why Nordic and Continental welfare and education regimes differ in the degree of comprehensiveness of their primary and lower secondary school systems. It analyses how school reforms, reform attempts and coalitions in the post-war decades were shaped by different cleavage structures in Norway and…

We provide a test of the thesis that Protestantism influenced the development of modern capitalism by using quantitative data from 1500 through 1870. Results show that during this period the percentage of a country's population that is Protestant is unrelated to both its level of per capita GDP and the average rate of its annual growth in per…