This paper examines European missionary and colonial expansion of the long nineteenth century through the lens of religious sound history, focusing on bells as instruments of acoustic power, conflict, and negotiation. Using the object biography of a Protestant mission bell cast in southern Germany and transported to present-day Ghana, the study traces how bell sounds structured contested soundscapes across missionary settlements, African polities, and colonial administrations. Rather than treating sound merely as a by-product of domination, the paper conceptualizes bells as mobile technologies that produced and transformed sonic orders, temporal regimes, and claims to authority. Building on sound-historical approaches that emphasize "sonic ideologies," the analysis moves beyond binary distinctions between colonizers and colonized. It shows that European missions, colonial states, African kingdoms, and indigenous secret societies often shared assumptions about the political and spiritual potency of bell sounds, even as they struggled over control of acoustic space. The bell's repeated recontextualization - as mission tool, war trophy, royal regalia, colonial clock bell, and finally museum object - reveals how sound mediated conflicts between church and state, rival empires, and competing ecologies. Particular attention is paid to indigenous eco-spiritual sound regimes, in which forests, sacred trees, and animal sounds formed the basis of political and ritual knowledge. Missionary bell ringing frequently disrupted these regimes, provoking conflicts that linked sound to ecological destruction, initiation practices in the forest, and resistance to centralizing power.