This case study aims at looking behind the construal of imperialism as ‘white people saving brown children from brown people’ by reconstructing the reasons why locally enslaved children became available for missionaries of the Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (UZV) to purchase in Dutch New Guinea between 1863 and 1898. This analysis shows that, contrary to what the missionaries often claimed, children within local communities in the area of the Bird’s Head, Cenderawasih Bay and Biak-Numfoor islands were carefully raised to become part of the complex gift-kinship-systems of their people. However, some children, as well as adults, had the misfortune to live on the fault lines of competing or conflicting communities. Children were probably sold to repair systematic differences in power and wealth between inland and coastal peoples. Especially children who were already in a weak position – orphans, or children who became related to sorcery – were the first ones to be sold. Within local communities, after they were given away, sold or captured, children could be kindly adopted within another family, exploited to work the land, further traded or used in negotiations. Precisely during the first decades of the missionaries’ presence, the tensions and violence between inland and coastal communities raised, due to an uncontrolled boom in the hunt and trade of birds of paradise. This international market thus augmented those fault lines that ‘produced’ children for local slave markets, and, in the end, for missionaries to purchase. The missionaries themselves could only buy these children within the rationale of yet another ‘economy’: a western Christian-humanitarian economy in which the missionary ‘redemption’ of locally enslaved children raised money and support for the missions back home. De Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (UZV) rechtvaardigde haar aanwezigheid aan de noordkust van Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea tussen 1863 en 1898 onder andere door lokaal tot slaaf gemaakte kinderen vrij te kopen, oftewel, door ‘bruine ...