SOURCE: Porter, Andrew. “‘Commerce and Christianity’: The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan.” The Historical Journal 28, no. 3 (September 1985): 597-621.

[In the following essay, Porter examines the connection between commerce and Christianity popularized in the mid-nineteenth century by missionaries such as David Livingstone, who wrote that the two were “inseparable.” Porter argues that this sentiment was relatively short-lived and not reflective of the whole of nineteenth-century missionary thought.]

‘“What,” some simple-minded man might say, “is the connection between the Gospel and commerce?’”¹ Speaking in Leeds in May 1860 on behalf of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was characteristically robust with his rhetorical question and no less direct in furnishing the answer. ‘There is a great connection between them. In the first place, there is little hope of promoting commerce in Africa, unless Christianity is planted in it; and, in the next place, there is very little ground for hoping that Christianity will be able to make its proper way unless we can establish a lawful commerce in the country’. Britain's part in forging the connexion was abundantly clear. It was

the intention of God to make it the interest of this, the most active, the most ingenious, and the freest people on the face of the earth, to be up and doing, and to be in earnest in the far more important work of spreading His Gospel throughout the world. Was it written in vain by the prophet, ‘and the ships of Tarshish first’? Was it not meant that God had given us our commerce and our naval supremacy—that industry, that patience which had enabled us to subdue the earth wherever we had settled … our wealth, with our mutual trust in each other, that we might as the crowning work of all these blessings, be the instruments of spreading the truths of the Gospel from one end of the earth to the other?

Of course the answer was yes, for, as the Bishop argued, drawing examples from the early history of the Christian church, the connexion rested on a dual principle. ‘The providence of God … has ordained that when Christianity is placed in any great centre, it should be borne everywhere by the natural power of commerce itself … commerce … is intended to carry, even to all the world, the blessed message of salvation’.² Just as commerce furthered Christianity, so the reverse was also true. Christianity, according to Wilberforce, has ‘the effect of training the human race to a degree of excellence which it could never attain in non-Christian countries’, giving ‘value to life’, ‘dignity to labour’ and ‘security to possession’, with the result that a Christian people would tend to be ‘a wealth-producing people, an exporting people and so a commercial people’.³

In a notable recent article, Dr Brian Stanley has argued that the pattern of thinking illustrated in these excerpts from Wilberforce's speech was very common among mid-Victorians. The beliefs in God's providence, divine contrivance, and benevolent design, the fundamental identity of duty and self-interest, were, he suggested, the main components of a theological system dominating evangelical reactions to the world about them. It was this set of beliefs which ‘enabled early Victorian Christians to regard the association of commerce and Christianity as … a natural and harmonious alliance’. ‘The facility with which [they] coupled together commerce and Christianity is explicable … primarily in terms of the providentialism which dominated nineteenth-century evangelical thought.’⁴ Stanley argues that these beliefs were clearly expressed on numerous occasions in the 1840s and 1850s—at the time of the Anglo-Chinese wars, in connexion with David Livingstone's journey across Africa and his spell in Britain in 1857, and above all as the result of the Indian Mutiny. To avoid a repetition of the Mutiny, to make the most of the new openings into China and Africa, to fulfil God's purpose for the world, it was necessary that—in Livingstone's words—‘Those two pioneers of civilization—Christianity and commerce—should ever be inseparable’.⁵ The peak of missionary confidence and perhaps too of commercial support for missions, the imperialism of the Gospel and of Free Trade, went hand in hand.

This is an attractive argument, and Stanley has produced a wealth of supporting illustration. Moreover, it is a type of analysis, one resting heavily on assumptions about both the degree of autonomy to be attributed to ideas, and the primacy of theological or intellectual beliefs in determining the pattern of missionary action, which has been used elsewhere in writing about late nineteenth-century missionary motivation.⁶ However, this article explores the connexions which missionary supporters made between commerce and Christianity over a longer period, and with more specific reference to particular areas of missionary activity. It argues that if this is done, it becomes increasingly difficult to accept an appeal to providentialist theology as the principal factor in mid-Victorian arguments linking commerce with Christianity. The suggestion is made that far more significance ought to be attached to the cumulative experience which societies acquired in the mission fields, to the contrasting conditions under which missionaries had to work, and to changes in the nature of British society. These produced marked variations in the willingness of men to accept either the possibility or the necessity of linking Christianity and commerce in any direct way, despite their common theological persuasion.

I

The missionary movement of the late eighteenth century was not only the product of the enthusiasm of the evangelical revival, but gathered strength within a context provided by debate about the meaning of civilization and especially the possibility of civilizing, or improving the conditions of, non-European peoples. By the end of the century there was very little doubt as to the actual characteristics of civilization; Britain's own culture and institutions provided the yardstick. Already by the 1760s, Adam Smith had established the progressive stages through which human societies advanced to their culmination in ‘the commercial age’. Under the influence of Scottish writers, it became steadily more conventional to assume that with progress in commerce came political sophistication. Development of the political arts meant good government, order, and the liberty of individuals. Britain's pre-eminence in commerce and industry produced moral benefits too, for these pursuits provided ‘bulwarks against passions, vice and weakness’.⁷ In matters of faith and ethics, Christianity embodied the peak of religious perfection, a point on which even Sydney Smith could speak for almost everyone. ‘We believe that we are in possession of a revealed religion; that we are exclusively in possession of a revealed religion; and that the possession of that religion can alone confer immortality, and best confer present happiness.’⁸ Such pre-eminence and good fortune were very widely felt to create obligations to less fortunate societies. By 1800, there were few who took an uncritical or broadly tolerant view of non-European societies, fewer still who admired their achievements. The duty of benevolence was enjoined on both religious and secular grounds: its fulfilment necessitated the civilization of the peoples of Africa and Asia. There were, not unnaturally, sceptics and others who ridiculed any such attempts. The general result, however, in the words of the Eclectic Review, was that ‘The melioration of the condition of the human race, in every form, never employed so great a number of active and benevolent minds, as at the present time … one directs his views to one object, and another to another … but all unite in endeavours to augment the sum of human felicity.’⁹ British law, commerce, good government, literature, education, were all it seemed for export, and even those who ridiculed the missionary were likely to approve his purpose. Sydney Smith roundly asserted the obligation to disseminate Christianity. ‘This religion … teaches us the duties of general benevolence: and how, under such a system, the conversion of Heathens can be a matter of indifference, we profess not to be able to understand.’¹⁰

Consideration of how this process of civilization might be achieved began to encourage closer attention to priorities, and to the ways in which aspects of civilized society might be mutually supportive. The precise relations between Christianity and commerce, evangelism and trade, might appear at this point to become of logical importance to the discussion. Yet this was not how contemporaries saw things. In debates about the policy to be adopted towards India or Africa, or discussion of the best missionary methods, a distinction frequently drawn was that between Christianity on the one hand and civilization on the other. The questions to be answered were which should be introduced first, and in what forms?

For some, concerned often with law or administration, there was no doubt that the answer lay with civilization. Churchmen often reproached such unsympathetic lay critics for making the ‘common, but absurd mistake, that the sublime doctrines of the gospel are not to be addressed to heathens, because their untutored minds are not prepared to comprehend them’.¹¹ Yet the right approach to missions and other agencies of improvement also brought divisions within the churches. Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff, expected little result from missionary work; rather it was through the ‘extension of science and commerce … [that] India will be christianized by the government of Great Britain’.¹² Civilization under government auspices would bring Christianity in its train. Evangelicals often despaired at such opinions, as for example when the Reverend William Tennant wrote hopefully of agriculture and the level of manufactures in India but appeared ‘to consider attempts to convert the Hindoos, in their present state, as a fruitless effort’. ‘Exceedingly sorry we are, to perceive such sentiments drop from the pen of a clergyman’, complained one outraged reviewer.¹³ Even supporters of missions fell out over the priority of civilization or Christianity. The experience of the Moravian Brethren, for example, was used as ammunition on both sides of the argument.¹⁴ Within the Presbyterian Church of Scotland a long-running dispute was carried on between Moderates, such as Hill and Inglis, who believed that a degree of ‘civilization’ was an inescapable prerequisite for conversion, and evangelicals who trusted that the true and universal religion could be grasped by human beings who were everywhere the same. After his experience of contrasting Scottish parishes, Thomas Chalmers was convinced that ‘There is no controverting the existence of a moral sense in the rudest of barbarians … in all countries you have a ground upon which you can enter.’¹⁵ Nevertheless, even while many evangelicals tended to argue that Christianity could perfectly well precede civilization, there was certainly no clear feeling that it should necessarily do so.

These discussions, in so far as Christians were involved, took place within the framework of providentialist theology. This was the world of Bishop Butler's Analogy, Archdeacon Paley's Evidences of Christianity, and William Wilberforce's Practical view of religion. Yet commerce and Christianity were regarded as essentially separate issues, and were not linked together in the way that was to become common fifty years later. Commerce, particularly foreign trade, was a fundamental characteristic of a civilized society, but ‘civilization’ which lay at the centre of the general concern was felt both to comprise far more than commercial activity and to be clearly distinguishable from Christianity. The understanding of commerce above all as the exchange of primary produce or raw materials for manufactures, and the identification of such a system of exchange as a prime factor in the dissemination and support of Christianity among non-Europeans, were not features of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates about evangelization. In 1792 the Baptist missionary William Carey was quite as struck by Isaiah's reference to ‘the ships of Tarshish’ as was Samuel Wilberforce, but he saw far less immediate relevance in it. ‘This seems to imply that in the time of the glorious increase of the church, in the latter days, (of which the whole chapter is undoubtedly a prophecy,) commerce shall subserve the spread of the gospel … navigation, especially that which is commercial, shall be the means of carrying on the work of God …’¹⁶ For the time being, however, Carey saw in the adventurousness of the trader evidence that heathen territories were closer than one might think, and a reproof to Christians who nevertheless preferred to turn their backs on the wider world, rather than an auxiliary for the contemporary evangelist.¹⁷ So too, newly founded missionary societies like the London Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society were at pains to dissociate themselves as much from commercial activity as from any involvement in ‘political’ matters.¹⁸ To appreciate more fully some of the reasons for this, it is useful to look at the examples of India and Sierra Leone as important subjects of evangelical concern.

II

On Indian questions the views of Charles Grant, first a servant and later director of the East India Company, may stand for many. He seems always to have accepted the maxim that benevolence, whether in the promotion of good government or in fair trading, brought reflex benefits. Following his conversion in 1776, his faith in the company as an agent of improvement and civilization continued to grow; but so too did his conviction that good laws and decent customs were of no use without the integrity and moral discipline which Christianity alone could produce in those who directed or lived under the company's administration. He became increasingly critical of the company's past policies on the grounds that the value of its work had been totally undermined by its lack of concern with Christian teaching even for its own employees, and its effective prohibition of missionary activity among Muslims and Hindus. By 1792 Grant was clear in his own mind that the civilization and reformation of Indian society was not only necessary, but entailed nothing less than the steady introduction of the whole of Western learning.¹⁹ He pressed increasingly for the dissemination of Christianity, not just as a body of doctrine or collection of sublime truths, but as the essential ingredient required to bind western ways and culture together. His strategy was education, his medium the English language, and missionaries his agents. Missionaries he also defended not for any contribution which they might make to economic advance, but for their cultivation of the sense of community and common values between rulers and ruled: nothing could do more to secure Britain's government in India. Grant wholeheartedly opposed the expansion of commerce which many proposed to achieve by opening India to all traders. Preservation of the East India Company's monopoly, the restriction of trade, was essential, for it supported the company's administrative structure, the only agency capable of encouraging religion and so of changing India for the better. He was prepared to admit that ‘moral improvement would lead to economic improvement and help our commerce’, but trade in any direct sense was irrelevant to the propagation of his faith.²⁰ In his mind conversion had almost one might say, driven out trade.

Why did evangelicals feel commerce of so little importance to their work in India? If Grant were alone in his views he might be dismissed as someone concerned simply to reconcile his religious opinions with a vested interest in the company's own chances of profit. His suggestion that missionaries contributed to security might be written off as another instance of the facility with which evangelicals and humanitarians attempted to win wide support by claiming that their policies served fundamental national interests.²¹ In fact his arguments were widely representative, and carried conviction because they rested on both historical fact and present experience. This was demonstrated by the debates in 1813 on the renewal of the East India Company's charter and the admission of missionaries to India.

Evangelicals who pressed for changes in the charter were convinced that commerce as such had done nothing to improve India, even if it appeared that the company itself had been reformed since the supposedly rapacious days of the mid-eighteenth century. The past record of trading activity hardly suggested a latent capacity for supporting effective evangelism. It is, after all, very noticeable that while supporters of missions were happy to see pressure from all sides put on the company to change its ways, they avoided aligning themselves with free traders anxious to open India to all and sundry.²² Many evangelicals seem to have been ready to accept the company's own argument that, while there might be honourable traders, nevertheless ‘far the greater number would be adventurers of desperate or needy circumstances’.²³ Supporters of the admission of missionaries and more clerics were consequently at pains to impress on parliament by contrast their own sobriety and orderly intentions. For example, ‘all the ministers and licentiates [of the Church of Scotland] have received a regular university education, which qualifies them both for teaching schools, and for performing the services of religion, and which at the same time affords a presumption in favour of their discretion and the propriety of their conduct’.²⁴ Programmes of action were to be similarly restrained. The London Missionary Society stated its intention ‘to rely for their success upon the divine blessing attending a candid statement of the evidences which sustain the Christian religion, of the sacred doctrines, promises and precepts of which it principally consists, and on their exemplary and blameless lives, attended by deeds of kindness and good-will to the natives’.²⁵ William Wilberforce emphasized the great importance of the general education and diffusion of knowledge which missionaries would also provide. These he saw as the essential counterpart of the religious instruction in that they broadened the native mind and placed local superstitions in a different light. The combination of reason and truth, enlightenment and Christian mission, would be irresistible: ‘the natives of Hindostan … would, in short, become Christians, if I may so express myself, without knowing it’.²⁶

It might be objected that these were just arguments for the occasion. It is of course true that missionaries suffered from an especially bad press early in the nineteenth century. Sydney Smith's reference to ‘little detachments of maniacs … benefiting us much more by their absence than the Hindoos by their advice’ was only remarkable in being more stylish than the general run of abuse.²⁷ Missionaries certainly needed to defend their own character and the reasonableness of their brand of religion. Moreover, uncertainty as to the outcome of the Charter revision compelled evangelicals to avoid arguments which might antagonize trading interests on either side. Representations in favour of an educational strategy were arguably calculated to do both.

However, there was more to this distancing of Christianity and the missionary cause from commerce than either an historical assessment of India's progress or calculations of immediate political expediency. Although practical caution may have prompted supporters of missions to India to present their case in ways which played down links between the expansion of commerce and that of Christianity, even on occasions when connexions were made it was with a view to assisting or justifying the missionary presence rather than drawing out any direct instrumental connexion between conversion and economic pursuits.²⁸ Wilberforce himself called reluctantly for an alliance with commercial interests in order to destroy the restrictive powers of the East India Company, not because he expected the diffusion of Christianity to be assisted by freer trade.²⁹ In fact the case had gone against any such link for two main reasons. On the one hand, circumstances were such that prospects for the expansion of British trade with India were widely regarded as poor or even non-existent. On the other, few who believed in a rosy commercial future saw in the introduction of Christianity a sufficient condition for growth: India's stunted development was the product of the East India Company's monopoly, and only its abolition could open the way for expansion. It was thus possible for both commercial pessimists and optimists to believe that Christianity and civilization might flourish apart from commerce, and that the best means of promoting Christianity were independent of trade.

Lord Teignmouth, for example, had no doubt that entry for missionaries into the company's territory was desirable, that conversion was possible, and that the introduction of Christianity ‘would tend to the improvement of [the Hindus'] civil condition’. But when asked if an improved civil and moral condition ‘would tend to increase their consumption of the various manufactures of their own or of any other country’, he was certain it would not.³⁰ He and many others who gave evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into the affairs of the East India Company argued that the reason for the limited trade of India and the company's own losses lay chiefly in the poverty of Indians, their lack of purchasing power, and the absence of any actual need for European goods.³¹ Economic facts of life rather than the religious and moral state of India's inhabitants governed the levels of trade.

If the promotion of Christianity would not further trade, neither did expanding trade promise or depend on religious conversion. Grenville put the anti-monopolist view that trade once opened would perpetuate itself unaided.

By commerce, commerce will increase, and industry by industry. So it has ever happened, and the great Creator of the world has not exempted India from this common law of our nature. The supply, first following the demand, will soon extend it. By new facilities new wants and new desires will be produced. And neither climate nor religion, nor long established habits, no, nor even poverty itself, the greatest of all present obstacles, will ultimately refuse the benefits of such an intercourse to the native population of that empire. They will derive from the extension of commerce, as every other people has uniformly derived from it, new comforts and new conveniences of life, new incitements to industry, and new enjoyments in just reward of increased activity and enterprize.³²

In his view neither Hinduism nor Islam were barriers to commerce, and such obstacles as existed required not a religious transformation but the divorce of secular sovereignty from commercial monopoly.

That freer trade had little to offer the evangelicals seemed to be further confirmed by first-hand experience. Even the most enthusiastic Baptists had found themselves drawn rapidly into teaching and the scholarly work of translation and publishing. Moreover, such economic activities as they became involved in seem to have had little connexion with trade. Their concern was overwhelmingly with poor relief, and the encouragement of subsistence through limited agricultural improvements.³³ It is therefore not surprising to find evangelicals, well before the great debate on the East India Company in 1813, firmly convinced as to the only worthwhile methods. Discussing two of a series of dissertations ‘on the best Means of Civilizing the Subjects of the British Empire in India, and of diffusing the light of the Christian Religion throughout the Eastern World’, the Eclectic Review was gratified ‘that both the present writers, though of different national establishments, concur … in the opinion we formerly intimated, that it is from the united measures of circulating the scriptures, and of employing suitable missionaries, [by which was meant well-trained educated men] that we most reasonably may hope for the advancement of Christianity in the Eastern World’.³⁴ Preaching and teaching were the essential means; their effectiveness was to be increased by improving their quality and volume, not by linking them up with economic agencies. The British and Foreign Bible Society, supported strongly by Grant, Teignmouth, and Wilberforce, and the Religious Tract Society, were the purest expression of contemporary missionary strategies.³⁵

III

In the case of Sierra Leone, despite the direct commercial interest and missionary concern of its evangelical promoters, a similar pattern of attitudes can be discerned: there emerged no instrumental connexion between commerce and Christianity. After the failure of Granville Sharpe's project for resettling poor blacks in a self-sufficient self-governing ‘Province of Freedom’, the Sierra Leone Company was founded in 1790.³⁶ Taking over Sharpe's concession, its object was ‘the Introduction of Civilization into Africa’.³⁷ This the Company expected to achieve by the establishment of a trading settlement handling tropical produce; this would build up links with neighbouring tribes and serve as an example to them by its own industry, peace and prosperity. Persuasion by rational example would contribute to the abolition of the slave trade, the root cause of Africa's barbarity.

Civilization with the assistance of ‘legitimate’ trade, however, did not involve the intimate linking of commerce and Christianity which the Company's association with the Clapham Sect might lead one to expect. Others have noted how ‘the Sierra Leone Company began with hardly any thought about the possible uses of either education or missionary work’.³⁸ In the early days of the venture there were perhaps good reasons for this. It was mounted hastily, in part to rescue the earlier scheme, and Nova Scotian blacks, supposedly already educated Christians, were brought in. The missionary movement itself was only just beginning. The accent on legitimate trade may have owed more than anything to domestic political necessity: Wilberforce and his friends found in that idea something with which to counter the pro-slavery lobby's arguments that slavery was ineradicably rooted in African conditions, and abolition would seriously damage Britain's interests.³⁹ However, one has to explain not just the start of the company, but the persistence of this predominant concern with the secular aspects of civilization throughout the company's life.

The emphasis certainly owed a lot to bitter experience, not least of recalcitrant colonists and intractable physical conditions. Parliamentary defenders of the Company in 1802 made much of claims to some educational progress. Castlereagh mentioned details, and Henry Thornton, the Company's chairman, appealed to the ‘wisest legislators and the most celebrated writers [who] agreed in this position, that the introduction of knowledge must ever precede civilization’. Directors in submissions to the parliamentary Select Committee examining their affairs observed that it ‘need scarcely be remarked how much Civilization is forwarded by promoting regular Industry and good Order, by affording complete Protection, by facilitating the fair Acquisition of Property, and by securing the quiet enjoyment of legitimate Influence and Power’.⁴⁰ But these were piecemeal gains. By 1807, Thornton could claim no more than to have proved what he had professed to believe when setting up the company nearly twenty years before, ‘the practicability of civilizing Africa’.⁴¹

Thornton's explanation of his conviction is worth noting.⁴² ‘What were the great impediments to the improvements of a country?’, he asked his parliamentary audience. ‘Either something, first, in the climate; or, secondly, in the soil; or, thirdly, in the character of the inhabitants.’ He then commented on each to show that in ‘no one of these respects was there any insuperable obstacle to civilization’. Not only was the creation of an expanding trade possible: thanks to the Company, there now also existed ‘a body of colonists on the coasts of Africa, speaking the English language, attached to the English people, advancing in civilization and morals, and increasing in numbers’. From both the trade and the colonists, Britain might expect ‘substantial advantages’.

Here, mention of Christianity and the role of conversion were notable by their absence. Despite the wish of the Company's supporters to introduce ‘among the natives … the blessings of religion’,⁴³ there was no suggestion either that hopes for commerce rested on the establishment of Christianity or that commerce would in any way be the vehicle for religious progress. In India many evangelicals had either ignored or been frankly sceptical about commercial prospects. In Sierra Leone, where it was impossible to ignore the future of legitimate trade, they were also apparently convinced of its potential. Yet there was still no marriage of trade with religion, in either theory or practice. Most graphically illustrative of the separation was the complete removal from Sierra Leone of the sons of local notables: for their education and religious instruction they were brought to board beside Clapham Common.⁴⁴ Such missionary activity as there was in Sierra Leone (the CMS had been at work since 1799 and the Wesleyans entered later in 1811) followed models familiar in India. Where possible the village school, a range of English learning, religious literature and preaching made up the preferred mode; at a higher level, where Bishop's College, Calcutta, led the way, the Fourah Bay Institution followed.

IV

Despite the existence in all essentials of a theological framework which early evangelicals were to share with their mid-nineteenth-century successors, these were the responses to problems of missionary expansion from a world which in other respects was still very different. Forging a link between expanding commerce and conversion to Christianity was later to be proved possible within a providentialist system of reference. Indeed, one of the beauties of such a system was that, just as under God all things were possible, so, given the assumptions of benevolent purpose and overall design, all things were in fact interdependent and connected. The historian, however, has to explain not so much the logical possibilities inherent in the system of belief, as the preference of one generation of evangelicals for certain connexions rather than others. Inevitably a range of circumstances is important here. In emphasizing the overriding importance of teaching, literacy, and the diffusion of the Scriptures, the early missionary movement, its enthusiasm notwithstanding, was drawing heavily on the rationalist traditions of eighteenth-century thought in matters other than its theology. In their reluctance to link Christianity with the commerce which it was generally agreed heralded a major advance in civilization, early evangelicals implicitly denied that Christianity and a particular culture necessarily went hand in hand. Alongside their individualistic understanding of conversion and religious commitment, the universality of reason and conscience were no less impressive than the concept of civilization and the idea of progress towards it by historical stages. In the debate about civilization, Christianity was frequently placed separately and on one side. Evangelicals were often involved in that debate and tended to preserve the separation, convinced that Christianity was universally acceptable and brought benefits to any society which embraced it. They continued to think that Christianity could be introduced by universally applicable methods, preaching and education. When the L. M. S. opened their Missionary Academy at Hoxton, they did so with the conviction that ‘Education and the press are the two great means, which in connection with preaching, will bring about the moral revolution of the world’.⁴⁵ Their belief in the efficacy of these methods reflected not only the state of contemporary knowledge concerning non-European societies, but also observations of their own. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Britain was still a society where rank and hierarchy were important, where many thought that while a man might rise, most were still born to their station. Where no one class yet regarded itself as the national repository of universal virtues, it was natural to reflect that ‘here, and everywhere, the success of the Gospel is, and always has been, greater among the lower and middling classes of society than among the rich, noble and wise’. For the evangelical, concerned as often as not with the reformation of manners and extirpation of vice at all levels of society at home as well as with missions overseas, the conclusion was unavoidable: although ‘a high state of civilization presents advantages for the introduction of Christianity, it may … be attended with disadvantages which over-balance them’.⁴⁶ In such a world, commercial advance and religious conversion were not easily linked.

V

One implication of the argument so far is that as changes took place in the mission field, as evangelical experience of missionary problems grew, and as socio-economic circumstances altered at home, so the evangelical formulation of the link between civilization and Christianity, Christianity and commerce, would also change. Certainly this seems to have happened, for despite the persistent framework of evangelical theology, shifts in thinking are clearly discernible in the 1820s. Although at first these were often unsystematic, thinking crystallized rapidly in the following decade, and on two particular occasions in the 1830s missionary leaders were not only provided with the opportunity but were self-confident enough to spell out their views at length.

In outline, missionary attitudes to India changed least of all. Notwithstanding the expansion of British commerce after 1813 and the further expectations of growth when the East India Company's monopoly of the China trade was ended in 1833, the educational strategy remained fashionable. Commercial activity seemed to bear no relation to successful conversion, and the total numbers of converts remained very small. It therefore seemed more rational to alter the content of the education missionaries provided. The curriculum was progressively broadened to link Christianity more closely with western learning; under the influence of Alexander Duff, the emphasis on higher education was increased in the hope of converting Brahmins, so producing able native agents with the intention of undermining Indian religions from the top.

Elsewhere, different conditions prompted alternative approaches. In both the British West Indies and Cape Colony, missionaries became steadily more aware of the extent to which the development of colonial rule had promoted conditions of subordination for large numbers of non-Europeans which were incompatible with a truly Christian existence. Not only were the activities of missionaries themselves severely restricted by colonial officials, white settler farmers, and planter-dominated assemblies. Conditions of life for slaves or for the notionally free but hardly less restricted Khoikhoi labourers of the Cape were such as to deprive them of both opportunities to hear the Gospel and the freedom or liberty of choice essential to practical Christian morality. Under such conditions, many missionaries' thoughts turned to prescriptions of political and economic change.

Where such alternatives as already existed—like the hunting or peripatetic pastoralism still found in parts of the Cape—seemed hardly more conducive to conversion than labour for white masters, missionaries began openly to support the causes of slave emancipation, legal protection for free labour, and recognition of rights to the ownership of land. They thus came to favour the acquisition of property, the accumulation of capital, and the security of a settled existence for non-Europeans as essential supports to an independent Christian way of life. At the Cape, for example, it was the progress of their settlement at Bethelsdorp which brought home to L. M. S. missionaries the links between encouraging the Khoikhoi as both producers and consumers deeply involved in the commercial life of the colony, and the advance of Christianity.⁴⁷ The development of other stations from the 1820s onwards—Griqua Town, Philipolis, and finally the Kat River Settlement—only seemed to confirm the possibilities inherent in an alliance of commerce and Christianity.⁴⁸

For missionaries in the field, however, commerce could also have other connexions with successful efforts at conversion. This was perhaps most forcefully illustrated in another area of L. M. S. activity, the Pacific. There, the perennial complaints by missionaries about inadequate salaries were exacerbated by extreme isolation, highly irregular contact with the outside world, and desperate shortages of supplies. Trade in these circumstances became essential to subsistence. While it would appear that for some missionaries like George Pritchard or John Williams, ‘trading acquired a virtue of its own’ and even diverted them from missionary effort, others again appreciated the extent to which commerce also widened their influence and a trading ship extended their geographical range.⁴⁹

This drawing together of Christianity and commerce was further encouraged by the general necessities of missionary strategy and finance as perceived from societies' headquarters in London. The L. M. S. directors were both anxious to press on with the proliferation of mission stations ‘from the Eastern to the Western Shore of Africa’, and acutely concerned at the society's dire financial position. A settlement like Bethelsdorp offered a solution to both problems: growing prosperity and the accumulation of wealth through involvement in industry and commerce would enable its inhabitants ‘to contribute towards the expense of the Mission and the support of the Missionaries’, thus freeing metropolitan resources for employment elsewhere.⁵⁰ Before long the London directors were asking the explicit question ‘how far is it right to spend money on stations which cannot be made productive’?⁵¹

As evidence of the cumulative effect of these piecemeal changes occurring over some twenty-five years, the arguments developed by evangelicals in testimony to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines in 1836-7 are of particular significance. This committee was set up to ‘consider what Measures ought be adopted with regard to the NATIVE INHABITANTS of Countries where BRITISH SETTLEMENTS are made, and to the neighbouring Tribes, in order to secure to them the due observance of Justice and the protection of their Rights; to promote the spread of Civilization among them, and to lead them to the peaceful and voluntary reception of the Christian Religion’.⁵² Among those giving evidence were the secretaries of the three principal missionary societies, the C. M. S., the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, and the L. M. S., who drew on their acquaintance with a wide range of British settler communities and non-European societies in South Africa, New Zealand, North America, and the South Seas.⁵³

Whatever reservations had existed about European activity overseas at the end of the eighteenth century had been multiplied and confirmed. Coates, Beecham, and Ellis for the missionary societies were unanimous that ‘the effect of European intercourse has been, upon the whole, a calamity on the heathen and savage nations’, tending ‘to prevent the spread of civilization, education, commerce and Christianity’.⁵⁴ In these circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that the eighteenth-century question, as to introducing first either Christianity or civilization, they answered unequivocally by asserting that Christianity both could and should pave the way.⁵⁵

Although these statements can be seen as more authoritative confirmations of older views, further evidence to the committee focused on the question of how conflict was to be minimised, and shows missionary arguments beginning to take a turn which points clearly in the direction of Livingstone's and Wilberforce's views of 1860. Here the influence of South African and New Zealand examples was very strong, and it emerged that appropriation of native lands and attempts to control their labour were the greatest source of grievance.⁵⁶ Protection of native possessions and working conditions were felt to require the strengthening of colonial governors' powers, a considerable increase in the numbers of carefully chosen colonial officials, the extension of colonial jurisdiction beyond the formal frontiers, and official backing for missionaries.⁵⁷ This was essentially the programme which some missionaries in local settings, like Dr John Philip at the Cape, had pressed for since the 1820s.⁵⁸ Like Philip before them, both witnesses and Committee members realized that such measures, by promoting native security and independence, would in many respects reduce the contact between natives and colonizers; on the other hand, they argued, commercial contacts could be expected to increase.⁵⁹ Arguments in favour of official support for missionaries were put forward not only because their presence had minimized the problems of contact between aborigines and settlers, but because it was expected to promote trade to a degree impossible without them.⁶⁰ If, as these proposals were designed to ensure, ‘commerce were conducted on truly Christian principles [it] might be made the means of communicating the most substantial benefits to the different aboriginal nations of the world’.⁶¹ Commerce between whites and blacks, then seen as a relationship of equal exchange, held out more promise for all than white agriculture with black labour.⁶²

Discussion of the results expected from this prior introduction of Christianity led in a similar direction. Although in practice Christianity should be first on the scene, its effects were such that ‘the moment Christian principle begins to bear upon the mind of man, from that moment his condition as a civilized being advances, and hence Christianity and civilization advance pari passu’.⁶³ Consideration of the civilization which ‘invariably followed’ Christianity⁶⁴ began to reveal further tendencies in evangelical thinking, namely the adoption of a more restricted definition of ‘true’ civilization and a stress on its commercial aspects. If the hallmarks of civilization could be defined as broadly as ever, it was now felt perfectly possible for a people to possess most of them ‘and at the same time [be] little better than savages’.⁶⁵ Not only was a high degree of culture without Christianity to be dismissed as barbarism; it was becoming clearer that Christianity too required the right cultural underpinning. After the guarantee of peace, ‘It is also necessary … to their moral and religious improvement, to encourage industry and commerce.’ Here again was an opening for the British government to act as an essential complement to the missionary societies: it should send out ‘individuals to promote agriculture and manufactures among uncivilized tribes on the borders of our colonies’. That done, it ‘would not be perhaps too much for a government standing in the position which the British Government does, to afford to people in such circumstances every facility and encouragement in commerce which the remission of … duties would afford’.⁶⁶ Freer trade would thus assist ‘moral and religious’ transformation. The introduction of Christianity and ‘social improvement’ was itself referred to not only in an older language which still spoke of compassion or benevolence and atonement for wrong, but also now as ‘a fair remuneration for the loss of their lands’, in other words in the language of contract and exchange.⁶⁷

The proceedings of the Aborigines Committee suggest that for evangelicals experience had confirmed the promotion of a system of trading relations as the only way of organizing mutually beneficial contact between settlers and natives. Trade could be expected to follow right on the heels of Christianity and in such circumstances could be seen as a necessary support. Outside the Committee Room, missionary society policy was being developed to give effect to this conviction. Responding at last to suggestions from their missionaries in the Pacific, the L. M. S. and the Wesleyans were sanctioning the extension of those local developments which tied the expansion of Christianity more closely to trade.⁶⁸ In areas outside the Aborigines Committee's brief, experience also prompted the same equation of commerce and Christianity. The extent of the slave trade in West Africa was continuing to alarm humanitarians. Sierra Leone had failed to set the hoped-for example. Britain's slave trade squadron on the coast, diplomatic negotiations with European powers, treaties with local African rulers, had all made little impact; as a result, it was said, Christianity ‘had made but feeble inroads’. On the other hand, ‘were this obstacle removed’ by a successful promotion of legitimate trade, ‘Africa would present the finest field for the labours of Christian missionaries which the world has yet seen’.⁶⁹

The writer of these words was T. F. Buxton, leading humanitarian, chairman of the Aborigines Committee, and chief spokesman for the anti-slavery movement. In the literature touching his career, Buxton's preoccupation with that Committee through at least two parliamentary sessions (1836-7) has been seen as little more than a diversion from the anti-slavery cause. Attention has been paid not to the width of Buxton's humanitarian concerns but to his published plans of 1839-40 for extirpating the slave trade and, against a background of popular agitation, their outcome in the government-supported Niger Expedition of 1841-2, with its ideas for the civilization of Africa by promoting legitimate trade based on African agriculture well inland.⁷⁰ From the perspective of the developing links between Christianity and commerce, however, it is the interplay between the different aspects of Buxton's wide-ranging activity which is most striking. Buxton arrived at his conviction that if legitimate trade were organized on a proper basis then the slave trade could not hope to survive the competition. This was in the summer of 1837, just as he finished writing the Aborigines Committee Report. That report embodied many of the missionaries' recommendations, and Buxton attached great importance to it as a statement of policy.⁷¹ Clearly it was not something to be pushed quickly to one side; it remained to influence the West African planning to which he now turned.

Although in details his ideas altered, and constantly echoed points made by earlier writers on West Africa,⁷² the coherence of Buxton's Niger scheme owed much to the Aborigines Report of 1837. Buxton argued amongst other things that ‘Government should take on itself the whole duty and expense of preserving the peace, and of affording the necessary protection to new British settlements in Africa’.⁷³ It was of the greatest importance that missionaries should be placed in all these centres of legitimate trade as agents of Christian instruction, material prosperity, and civilization. In justifying these arguments Buxton quoted extensively from the Aborigines Committee evidence.⁷⁴ No wonder the C. M. S. associated itself closely with the Niger venture. Beecham of the W. M. M. S., impressed by the reception of his ideas before Buxton's 1837 Committee, also now supported him, as did other missionary societies.⁷⁵ In this way missionary supporters rallied to the flag of legitimate trade. Men like Buxton were delighted: impressed by missionary evidence to the 1837 Committee, they now believed there were no more reliable supporters of the standard to be found.

Analyses of changing circumstances in areas of white settlement, and in the very different conditions of both the Pacific and West Africa, pointed in the same direction. The purposeful combination of legitimate trade and missionary work above all held out the best prospect of peace, security, and civilized relations between black and white.⁷⁶ These connexions suggested by events on the fringes of British activity overseas were also confirmed in other ways. In the very difficult years of 1837-42, conditions for large numbers in Britain's industrial cities were extremely harsh; the recovery and expansion of the country's foreign trade seemed to offer most hope of reviving industry and development. Evangelicals commonly applied themselves and the same formulae to domestic as to foreign missions, and Buxton's writings suggest that he was no exception in this. Not only might ‘a legitimate commerce with Africa … be … the attendant, of civilization, peace, and Christianity’ for blacks: it held out help to handloom weavers as well. ‘Any extension … of the trade to Africa … will [also] cause a corresponding increase in the demand for the labour of a class of individuals who have lately been truly represented as suffering greater privations than any other set of workmen connected with the cotton trade.’⁷⁷ Civilization, Christianity, and commerce were on the verge of becoming identified in the evangelical mind not only abroad but at home.

One further alteration was required to make possible the identification of commerce and Christianity in the manner understood by Samuel Wilberforce, Livingstone, or a mid-century missionary strategist like the C. M. S. Secretary, Henry Venn. For the evangelicals of the late 1830s and early 1840s, the state still had an important part to play in supporting true religion, by upholding the conditions of peace and legality within which missionaries could operate and legitimate trade thrive. Twenty-five years later, there was not only a much firmer conviction that trade and Christianity would reinforce each other; more significant was the expectation that evangelists and traders could proceed together and be kept in harness without the intervention of government.

Providential theology surely had scant relevance to this change, even if it was capable of encompassing it. On the one hand, the change can be attributed to a silent acknowledgement by evangelicals of a fait accompli. Especially after the failure of the Niger Expedition, no home government was prepared to back the expansion of missionary enterprise in association with legitimate trade in tropical Africa. After the widespread expansion of influence or territorial control in the 1840s, there followed numerous imperial moves to abandon awkward or costly responsibilities. Evangelical protests were inadequate to halt the process by which local powers of self-government were extended in white settler colonies, and the warnings of the 1837 Committee were largely ignored. The change was only strengthened by the steady abolition of restraints on trade and government refusal to make protective concessions, notably in the case of the West Indies, which might have upheld particular evangelical enterprises. The tendency too of governments towards neutrality in religious questions at home inevitably depressed evangelical expectations.

If government was proving itself a broken reed, then evangelicals had to look elsewhere. They did so with growing optimism because, again, experience rather than theology prompted them to do so. Numbers of native converts were growing significantly by 1850. Buxton had anticipated this possibility in 1839; a decade later, Henry Venn in his jubilee address to the C. M. S. confirmed their importance.⁷⁸ In West Africa above all, the problem of recruiting missionaries and the effects of European mortality led missionary organizers to place weight on the contribution of native converts to the organization and support of their own churches. In the 1840s and 1850s mission-educated Africans came to play significant parts as ministers, while others, especially traders, largely financed and ran their churches. The missionary societies at home enthusiastically supported the growth of these African Christian commercial communities.⁷⁹ In the south of the continent too Livingstone came to his awareness of the potential in an alliance of commerce and Christianity by way of experience leading him to conclude that ‘the Africans are all deeply imbued with the spirit of trade’.⁸⁰ In the person of the African convert and merchant was the answer to Livingstone's feeling that much of the future depended on it being found ‘that Christian missionaries and Christian merchants can remain throughout the year in the interior of the continent’.⁸¹ The promise perceived in Bethelsdorp early in the 1820s seemed capable of fulfilment in many other parts of the continent by the 1850s.

VI

The association of Christianity and commerce in the minds of mid-nineteenth-century evangelicals took place within a framework of providentialist theology, but cannot helpfully be explained ‘primarily in terms of’ these principles.⁸² The understanding of Christianity and commerce as mutually supportive, expanding in tandem, self-sustaining, and equivalent in all essentials to ‘civilization’, was only gradually achieved. It rested on both a theory of historical development by stages as well as experience of colonial and metropolitan societies accumulated over at least seventy years. It was affected by the changing relationships of evangelicals and governments. It held great attraction for those thinking chiefly of Africa, very little for those whose focus was India or the East, despite a growing tendency apparent there in the 1850s to question the educational strategy evolved twenty years before. It gained additional credence from the growth in numbers and nature of indigenous converts, again particularly in Africa.

Nevertheless, while recognizing the widespread adoption of the slogan in the 1850s, it is clear from what has already been said that the association of commerce and Christianity was never complete. Not only was its applicability geographically restricted,⁸³ but certain trades, not to mention trading methods, were always regarded as corrupt. The slave trade was now obviously condemned out of hand; so increasingly was the traffic in arms, opium and alcohol. These three were frequently encouraged by governments in anticipation of both their cumulative commercial effects and essential revenues. In effect they were a further reason for the waning of evangelicals' desire for government assistance from its peak about 1840; their continued expansion later in the century was a persistent reminder of the imperfections of even the most promising agencies. Eventually the impotence of missionaries faced with these trades led supporters of missions who prided themselves on their realism to argue that such commerce was after all of very little importance. Robert Cust, for example, a prolific and respected writer on missionary subjects and very influential inside the C. M. S., trenchantly criticized those who agitated ‘on the subject of the Cultivation of the Poppy and Manufacture of Opium, the export of Rum and Gin, and the Immorality of the British Soldier’. These were matters ‘which have no direct bearing on the Evangelization of the World’; instead, concern with them only served to make the missionary cause unpopular.⁸⁴

That such forms of exchange could be seen by the 1880s as irrelevant to missionary strategy is telling evidence that belief in the productive union of Christianity and commerce was not only imperfect, but also short-lived. Cust was not arguing against such causes simply because he disliked their supporters; he felt it was ‘idle to fight against Nature, free-trade, and the liberty of each man to control his own actions in things not forbidden by the laws of civilized nations’. As his own writings demonstrated, it was very little distance from such a position to the revival of arguments that missions should studiously avoid all economic activity. ‘It is not wise’, he said, ‘for a missionary to engage in Commerce, or Manufactures, or Agriculture: it takes the spirituality out of him.’⁸⁵ The early and mid-nineteenth-century evangelical support for well-ordered, acceptable, ‘legitimate’ trade had been very directly the offspring of the struggle against trades regarded as unacceptable because they threatened the possibility of a truly Christian existence. As the latter forms of exchange ceased to matter, so naturally did the promotion of righteous substitutes.

This drift of even mainstream missionary thinking away from commerce gathered force in the 1860s in places where hopes of the union had been highest. Most dramatic perhaps was the collapse of Livingstone's own plans. ‘I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity’, he told his audience in the Cambridge University Senate House in December 1857.⁸⁶ Soon the Universities' Mission to Central Africa was established in order, as many people thought, to help him; but the venture inland up the Zambezi collapsed, and amid mutual recrimination the missionaries resettled themselves at Zanzibar.⁸⁷ The promised openings in central Africa did not materialize, and in much of eastern Africa the absence of obvious cash crops like the palm oil of the west made the emphasis on commerce seem misplaced. Even on the west coast progress did not match expectations. Elsewhere in the empire this experience was repeated: in the West Indies by 1860 there was little sign of the free, prosperous, Christian societies to which evangelicals had looked forward for many years. By the 1870s, with setbacks to metropolitan economic activity and worsening terms of trade, even legitimate commerce frequently became a source of conflict and tension between European and non-European. As a result, the discussion of ‘Commerce and Christian Missions’ at the London Missionary Conference of 1888 was full of reservations, with participants conscious that far more often than not experience showed that commerce and Christianity had failed to support each other.⁸⁸ Criticism of the standards of native converts everywhere began to grow, and was frequently directed at their involvement in commercial pursuits.

The failure of commerce to materialize and of Christianity to advance according to expectations were associated with both criticism of existing missionary strategies and the search for alternatives. A profound reaction against missionary methods involving any measure of westernization, and the growth of missionary bodies marked by simplicity of organization, intense personal faith, and a commitment to itinerant evangelism, were features of the years 1865-90. Old-established societies like the Wesleyans and C. M. S. were deeply split by these developments.⁸⁹

It is certainly possible to see these changes as closely connected to decisive shifts in theological opinion. There is no doubt that the providentialism and rationality characteristic of much late eighteenth-century evangelical theology were breaking down. Potent sources of new inspiration not only for foreign missions but for evangelicals generally were the German pietist thinkers, whose influence has been studied in connexion with the origins of Hudson Taylor's China Inland Mission founded in 1865, and the American-influenced revival or holiness movements, whose impact began to be very marked after 1870.⁹⁰ However, if the historian asks in what circumstances the new ideas were able to take root and flourish, the influence of material and social conditions begins to loom large.

The genesis of the China Inland Mission is instructive here. The nineteenth-century expansion of the missionary work in China began from the Treaty Ports established in 1842 and 1858-60, and was to a large extent associated with commercial privileges. However, in China above all missionaries were likely to be conscious of the obstacles which these privileges created for evangelism, linked as they were with conquest and the opium trade. The extension of missionary freedoms in the Treaty of Tientsin (1858) and the Peking Convention (1860) after the second Opium War generated a wave of optimism; however, neither trade nor evangelism expanded as expected. Instead, anti-foreignism revived, and with it opposition to Christianity and missions on a scale long since unknown.⁹¹ In this context the strategy of the C. I. M. which involved playing down all links with western agencies and stressing where possible its identification with Chinese ways, made abundant practical sense whatever its specific theological justification.

There is no need to multiply examples of missions whose members and supporters rejected the mid-century slogan after 1870; indeed, the greater difficulty by far lies in finding evangelicals who had confidence in the beneficial association of Christianity and commerce. For the faith missions, dissociation of the two was imperative; plans to ‘evangelize the world in this generation’ necessarily involved not only great haste, but directed attention to areas which had never previously had the opportunity of hearing the Gospel message. A far more ready response was expected where Europeans had not yet made contact. A common theological outlook was not a prerequisite for abandoning the mid-century's conventional wisdom. Baptists and Plymouth Brethren on the Congo had their sentiments re-echoed by High Anglicans in the U. M. C. A. or the Oxford and Cambridge Missions to India. Livingstone had valued commerce in part for ‘speedily letting the tribes see their mutual dependence. It breaks up the sullen isolation of heathenism’.⁹² For Chauncy Maples or Bishop Weston in eastern Africa, however, the isolation came to seem vital. ‘We are getting too much in the world, and too civilized here for my tastes. It draws one away from one's real work, all this entertaining of Europeans, the calling of streamers, etc.’, wrote Maples. In addition to being a distraction, commerce and European contact were debasing in all manner of ways.⁹³ Less thoughtful, more middle-of-the-road Anglicans like Bishop Knight-Bruce in southern Africa inclined to a similar view.⁹⁴

Finally, one may observe again how not only conditions in the mission fields but metropolitan circumstances also reinforced the change of direction. Some missionaries were doubtless influenced by the mounting conviction that the racial characteristics of non-Europeans meant that religious and cultural changes would never follow the path already trodden by white societies. Historians have also argued that racial stereotyping mirrored the development in Britain of a rigidly class-divided society.⁹⁵ In such a situation it was perhaps natural that notions of equal commercial exchange should give way to a greater emphasis on European management or employment of non-European labour, and theology be called in to dignify a new set of economic relations. Some recent work, however, seems to suggest that the influence of class and intellectual persuasion assisted the decline of ‘commerce and Christianity’ in more subtle ways. It is striking that in India, where the juxtaposition of the two had always been weakest, missions had also attracted from the beginning a high proportion of graduates and others of significant social status. This continued to be true of India, and after 1870 spread much more widely throughout the missionary world.⁹⁶ Even where this was not the case, and missionaries were still drawn from ‘the lower middle and artisan classes’, patterns of recruitment and training were increasingly such as to encourage only those who shared or aspired to the essentially non-commercial ‘ethos of the clergy of Cheltenham’ and ‘the clerical establishment’.⁹⁷

VII

It is appropriate to end with a caveat. The variety of missionary experience and writings, the volume and variety of support for evangelism, and the consequent wealth of material for historians, create difficulties of many kinds. Ruthless selection is necessary, and exceptions to a pattern such as that sketched in this article are likely to be legion. This is particularly the case where terms like civilization, commerce, and even Christianity, were handled with the looseness inevitably associated with widespread and common usage. Periodization is especially difficult given the overlap between different generations of missionaries or metropolitan committee members, and the inevitable distance between home-based theorists and isolated evangelists wrestling with their day-to-day problems. Samuel Marsden backing his ‘civilization first’ strategy in New Zealand in the 1830s, and those Scottish businessmen and missionaries who nurtured the African Lakes Company after 1875, show how the nature and pace of broad changes in metropolitan thinking or rhetoric continued to coexist with discordant variety in individuals and local circumstances.⁹⁸

Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to conclude that the association of Christianity and commerce, while often regarded as characteristic of Victorians, was in fact only slowly developed, and declined far more rapidly than it had arisen. Its rise and fall were decisively influenced by a range of considerations among which theological views often seem to have had little influence. It is, however, also clear that changing theological convictions could provide an independent source of inspiration, and that missionary activity did not neatly parallel Britain's expansion as a commercial and industrial society. What is still required is an account of missionary expansion in the nineteenth century which will place it firmly within the context of both intellectual and material life.

Notes

1. Samuel Wilberforce, Speeches on missions, ed. Rev. Henry Rowley (London, 1874), p. 213.

2. Ibid. p. 212, speech at Leeds, 25 May 1860.

3. Ibid.

4. B. Stanley, ‘“Commerce and Christianity”: providence theory, the missionary movement, and the imperialism of free trade, 1842-1860’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 72, 93.

5. Rev. William Monk (ed.), Dr Livingstone's Cambridge lectures (Cambridge, 1858), pp. 19-21; Stanley, p. 93.

6. Andrew Porter, ‘Cambridge, Keswick, and late nineteenth century attitudes to Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, v (1976-7), 5-34; idem, ‘Evangelical enthusiasm, missionary motivation, and West Africa in the late nineteenth century: the career of G. W. Brooke’, ibid. vi (1977-8), 23-46.

7. P. J. Marshall and G. Williams, The great map of mankind: British perceptions of the world in the age of enlightenment (London, 1982), pp. 147, 149.

8. Edinburgh Review, xii (April 1808), 151-81, ‘Publications respecting Indian Missions’, p. 170.

9. Eclectic Review, i (October 1805), 762, in reviewing Indian recreations by the Rev. William Tennant.

10. Edinburgh Review, xii (April 1808), 170.

11. Eclectic Review, i (December 1805), 884, in reviewing African memoranda by Capt. P. Beaver.

12. R. Watson, Anecdotes of the life of Richard Watson (London, 1817), p. 198.

13. Eclectic Review, i (December 1805), 896.

14. Edinburgh Review, xxi (February 1813), 64-6, in reviewing Travels into Southern Africa by Henry Lichtenstein; Rev. W. Hanna, Memoirs of the life and writings of Thomas Chalmers (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1849-52), i, 390-2.

15. W. J. Roxborough, ‘Thomas Chalmers and the mission of the Church with special reference to the rise of the missionary movement in Scotland’ (Aberdeen, Ph.D. thesis, 1978), pp. 307, 359.

16. William Carey, An enquiry into the obligations of Christians, to use means for the conversion of the heathens (Leicester, 1792), p. 68. The biblical reference is to Isaiah, ch. lx, verse 9.

17. Ibid. pp. 67, 81-2.

18. David Bogue, ‘Objections against a mission to the heathen, stated and considered’, Sermons preached in London at the formation of the missionary society (London, 1795), pp. 132-3; the published Instructions of the committee of the Church Missionary Society and Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society when missionaries left for the field are full of warnings on these questions.

19. Charles Grant, Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, written in 1792, printed in P. P. 1831-2, viii (734), Report from the select committee on the affairs of the East India Company, General Appendix I.

20. A. T. Embree, Charles Grant and British rule in India (London, 1963), pp. 47, 118, 142-4, and passim; Grant, Observations, p. 88.

21. Cf. the argument in R. T. Anstey, The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition, 1760-1810 (London, 1975), ch. 14; and Thomas Chalmers, The utility of missions ascertained by experience (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 1816), p. 19.

22. See the petitions from supporters of missionaries in 1813, Parliamentary Debates, xxv and xxvi.

23. Parliamentary Debates, xxvi, 453, 31 May 1813, speech by Grant.

24. Ibid. xxv, 1092-3, 28 April 1813, Petition of elders and ministers of the provincial synod of Glasgow.

25. Ibid. 817-18, 14 April 1813, petition.

26. Ibid. xxvi, 832-3, 22 June 1813.

27. Edinburgh Review, xii (April 1808), 179-80; cf. Parliamentary Register, xviii, 685, 11 June 1802, speech by General Gascoyne on Sierra Leone.

28. Claudius Buchanan at the C. M. S. Anniversary Meeting, 1810, quoted in G. Bearce, British attitudes towards India, 1784-1858 (Oxford, 1961), p. 82; Grant in his Observations, talking of the diffusion of ‘our religion and knowledge’ as ‘the noblest species of conquest’, added ‘and wherever, we may venture to say, our principles and language are introduced, our commerce will follow.’, P. P. 1831-2, viii (734), General Appendix I, p. 88.

29. R. I. Wilberforce and S. Wilberforce, The life of William Wilberforce (5 vols., London, 1838), iv, 14, diary entry, 14 February 1812.

30. P. P. 1812-13, vii 18. Lord Teignmouth, previously Sir John Shore, governor-general in India, 1793-8, servant of the East India Company 1769-89, and member of the Board of Control 1807-28.

31. Parliamentary Debates, xxv, 493-500, 527-32, 648-56, April 1813, evidence of Thomas Graham, and Major-Gen. Alexander Kyd; ibid. xxvi, 436, May 1813, evidence of Mr Bruce.

32. Ibid. xxv, 739-40, April 1813.

33. E. D. Potts, British Baptist missionaries in India, 1793-1837 (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 70-4; K. Ingham, Reformers in India, 1793-1833: an account of the work of Christian missionaries on behalf of social reform (Cambridge, 1956).

34. Eclectic Review, ii (July 1806), 536.

35. As examples of this commonly held view, Wilberforce, Life, iv, iii, William Wilberforce to Lord Wellesley, 6 April 1813; and Henry Martyn, Sermons (Calcutta, 1822), no. xx, on the British and Foreign Bible Society.

36. P. D. Curtin, The image of Africa: British ideas and action, 1780-1850 (London, 1965), chs. 4-5; Christopher Fyfe, A history of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), p. 94; J. Peterson, Province of freedom: a history of Sierra Leone, 1787-1870 (London, 1969), ch. 1.

37. P. P. 1801-2, ii (339), Report from the committee on the petition of the court of directors of the Sierra Leone Company, p. 7.

38. Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 262.

39. Ibid., and pp. 105-7; R. A. Austen and W. D. Smith, ‘Images of Africa and British slave trade abolition: the transition to an imperialist ideology’, African Historical Studies, ii (1969).

40. Parliamentary Register, xviii, 683-7, 11 June 1802; P. P. 1801-2, ii (339), 22.

41. Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates, ix, 1004, 29 July 1807.

42. Ibid. 1003-5.

43. Parliamentary Register, xviii, 686-7, 11 June 1802, Henry Thornton.

44. P. P. 1801-2, ii (339), 30-1, evidence of William Greaves.

45. J. A. James, Missionary prospects: a sermon the substance of which was delivered in Hoxton Chapel … 1826, at the opening of Hoxton College as a missionary academy (Birmingham, 1826), p. 24.

46. Eclectic Review, ii (May 1806), 364.

47. For criticisms of a ‘wandering’ existence as inimical to Christianity, The journals of the Rev. T. L. Hodgson, missionary to the Seleka-Rolong and the Griquas, 1821-31, ed. R. L. Cope (Johannesburg, 1977), pp. 66, 76; notes by Dr John Philip, 1840, Philip papers, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, MSS Afr. s. 219C, fo. 591; James Read (L. M. S. missionary) to Sir John Cradock (governor, Cape of Good Hope), 23 Jan. 1812, Council for World Mission Archive, School of Oriental and African Studies, London (hereafter L. M. S.) 5/1/B/12.

48. The Kitchingman papers: missionary letters and journals, 1817 to 1848, from the Brenthurst collection, Johannesburg, ed. Basil Le Cordeur and Christopher Saunders (Johannesburg, 1976), pp. 129-34, 138-45, 156-9.

49. Niel Gunson, Messengers of grace: evangelical missionaries in the South Seas, 1797-1860 (Melbourne, 1978), pp. 115-21, 136; John Williams, A narrative of missionary enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London, 1837).

50. L. M. S. directors to James Read, April 1812, L. M. S. 5/1/D/25.

51. L. M. S. directors to John Philip, 9 April 1819, Philip papers, MSS Afr. s.216, fo. 70.

52. P. P. 1836, vii (538), and P. P. 1837, vii (425), contain the reports and proceedings of the select committee.

53. See D. Coates, John Beecham and William Ellis, Christianity the means of civilization (London, 1837), in which the missionary evidence was also published for a wider audience.

54. P. P. 1836, vii (538), Aborigines (British settlements): report from the select committee, qq. 4329-43; P. P. 1837, vii (425), Report from the select committee on aborigines (British settlements), p. 74.

55. P. P. 1836, vii (538), qq. 4376, 4385-6.

56. T. F. Buxton papers, Rhodes House Library, Oxford; G. R. Mellor, British imperial trusteeship, 1783-1850 (London, 1951), ch. 7; W. M. Macmillan, The Cape colour question: a historical survey (London, 1927), chs. 10-13; idem, Bantu, Boer, and Briton: the making of the South African native problem (Oxford, 1963, rev. edn), pp. 187-90.

57. P. P. 1836, vii (538), qq. 4350, 4375, and passim.

58. J. Philip, Researches in South Africa (2 vols., London, 1828), especially i, ch. x, and ii, 355-61; Macmillan, Cape coloured question. For evidence of Philip's own change of views under the impact of experience in the field, compare Rev. John Philip, Necessity of divine influence: a sermon preached before the Missionary Society … May 12, 1813 (London, 1813), with views of 1820-2, Philip papers, MSS Afr. s.216, fos. 91, 143.

59. P. P. 1837, vii (425), Report.

60. P. P. 1836, vii (538), qq. 4345-7.

61. Ibid q. 4367.

62. Kitchingman papers, p. 272; Philip to Miss Buxton, 15 March 1832, Philip papers, MSS Afr. s.219B, fo. 328.

63. P. P. 1836, vii (538), q. 4383.

64. Ibid. qq. 4416, 4397.

65. Ibid. qq. 4412, 4376, 4385.

66. Ibid. q. 4375.

67. Ibid. q. 4367. In later years, commercial language and analogies were still more consciously developed by commentators: Rev. James Johnston (ed.), Report of the centenary conference on the protestant missions of the world (2 vols., London, 1888), pp. 111-12.

68. Gunson, pp. 115-19, 132-6, and ch. 14, ‘The gospel of civilization’.

69. T. F. Buxton, The African slave trade (London, 1839, 2nd edn), pp. xi-xii.

70. J. Gallagher, ‘Fowell Buxton and the new African policy, 1838-42’, Cambridge Historical Journal, x (1950), 40; Curtin, p. 299; Macmillan, Bantu, Boer, and Briton, pp. 186-7; P. M. Pugh, Calendar of the papers of Sir T. F. Buxton, 1786-1845: List and Index Society: special series, Vol. 13 (London, 1979).

71. C. Buxton (ed.), Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Bart. (London, 1882), pp. 184-5.

72. Curtin, p. 300.

73. T. F. Buxton, The remedy (London, 1840), quoted in Gallagher, p. 43.

74. T. F. Buxton, The African slave trade and its remedy (London, 1840, 2nd edn), ch. 6 ‘The elevation of native minds’, pp. 502 ff.

75. Gallagher, p. 49.

76. P. P. 1842, xi (551), Report from the select committee on the West Coast of Africa, qq. 3586-722, 6471-539, 7688-725.

77. T. F. Buxton, The African slave trade (London, 1839, 2nd edn), pp. 195, 233.

78. Ibid. pp. xi-xii; W. Knight, Memoir of the Rev. H. Venn: the missionary secretariat of Henry Venn, B.D. (London, 1880), p. 277.

79. J. B. Webster, ‘The Bible and the plough’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, ii (1963), 418-34; J. F. A. Ajayi, ‘Henry Venn and the policy of development’, ibid. i (1959), 331-42; idem, Christian missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891 (London, 1965), chs. 3-6.

80. I. Schapera (ed.), Livingstone's missionary correspondence, 1841-1856 (London, 1961), p. 301, 12 October 1855.

81. Ibid. p. 185, 17 October 1851.

82. Stanley, p. 93.

83. Stanley also points out that Christianity and commerce were not linked in the context of South America, ibid. p. 94.

84. R. N. Cust, Notes on missionary subjects (London, 1889), p. 118.

85. Ibid. pp. 112, 42.

86. Cambridge lectures, p. 24.

87. O. Chadwick, Mackenzie's grave (London, 1959); D. R. Neave, ‘Aspects of the Universities' Mission to central Africa, 1858-1900’ (York, M.Phil. thesis, 1975).

88. Report of the centenary conference, i, 111-37.

89. Porter, ‘Evangelical enthusiasm’.

90. Porter, ‘Cambridge, Keswick, and late nineteenth century attitudes’; B. Stanley, ‘Home support for overseas missions in early Victorian England, c.1838-1873’ (Cambridge, Ph.D. thesis, 1979), ch.7, ‘The origins of “faith” missions’.

91. P. A. Cohen, China and Christianity: the missionary movement and the growth of Chinese anti-foreignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge, Mass. 1963); idem, ‘Christian missions and their impact to 1900’, The Cambridge history of China, X. Late Ch'ing, 1800-1911, ed. J. K. Fairbank and D. Twitchett (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 543-90.

92. Missionary correspondence, p. 301.

93. E. Maples, Chauncy Maples (London, 1897), p. 350, 31 August 1893, and p. 354; H. M. Smith, Frank Bishop of Zanzibar: life of Frank Weston, D.D., 1871-1924 (London, 1926), pp. 24, 41, 96-7, 242.

94. G. W. H. Knight-Bruce, Memories of Mashonaland (London, 1895), pp. 108-10.

95. A. Lorimer, Colour, class and the Victorians: English attitudes to the negro in the mid-nineteenth century (Leicester U.P., 1978).

96. S. Piggin, ‘The social background, motivation, and training of British protestant missionaries to India, 1789-1858’ (London, Ph.D. thesis, 1974), ch. 1.

97. C. P. Williams, ‘“Not quite gentlemen”: an examination of “middling class” protestant missionaries from Britain, c. 1850-1900’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxxi (1980), 301-15.

98. Rev. J. B. Marsden, Memoirs of the life and letters of the Rev. Samuel Marsden (London, 1858); The letters and journals of Samuel Marsden, 1765-1838, ed. J. R. Elder (Dunedin, 1932); H. W. Macmillan, ‘The origins and development of the African Lakes Company, 1878-1908’ (Edinburgh, Ph.D. thesis, 1970); J. McCracken, Politics and Christianity in Malawi, 1875-1940 (Cambridge, 1977).