William Carey and the Birth of the Modern Missionary Movement
A Northamptonshire cobbler-turned-Baptist-pastor, William Carey reached Calcutta in 1793 and launched the modern Protestant missionary movement, translating Scripture into more than 40 Indian languages.
William Carey was an English shoemaker and self-taught linguist who, in 1792, published An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens — the founding text of the modern Protestant missionary movement. The same year he helped found the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel.
He sailed for India in 1793 and settled eventually at Serampore, a Danish enclave near Calcutta where the East India Company's restrictions on missionary activity did not apply. With Joshua Marshman and William Ward — the "Serampore Trio" — he established a printing press, a college, and a translation programme that produced complete or partial Bible translations in more than 40 languages, including Bengali, Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi and Oriya.
Carey was also a botanist (a member of the Linnean Society of London), a social reformer who campaigned successfully against sati (widow-burning), and the first professor of Bengali and Sanskrit at Fort William College. He died at Serampore in 1834 having never returned to England.