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‘“Commerce and Christianity”: providence theory, the
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Stanley, B 1983, '‘“Commerce and Christianity”: providence theory, the missionary movement, and the
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‘Commerce and Christianity’: Providence Theory,
The Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism Of
Free Trade, 1842–1860
Brian Stanley
The Historical Journal / Volume 26 / Issue 01 / March 1983, pp 71 - 94
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X00019609, Published online: 11 February 2009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0018246X00019609
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Brian Stanley (1983). ‘Commerce and Christianity’: Providence Theory, The
Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism Of Free Trade, 1842–1860. The
Historical Journal, 26, pp 71-94 doi:10.1017/S0018246X00019609
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The Historical Journal, 26, 1 (1983), pp. 71-94
Printed in Great Britain
'COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY':
PROVIDENCE THEORY, THE
MISSIONARY MOVEMENT, AND THE
IMPERIALISM OF FREE TRADE,
1842-1860*
BRIAN STANLEY
Spurgeon's College, London
I
In February 1842 a wealthy lay congregationalist named Thomas Thompson
wrote to the secretaries of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society urging
them to do more to interest the young and the working classes in the cause of
foreign missions. Missionary advocates were needed, insisted Thompson, who
could
shew to our manufacturing population that Christianity Civilization & Commerce are
only synonimous terms - that the extension of the former will do more for a World
recovery - the bonding of distant nations with a Love of amity & good will & do more
for the employment of hundreds of thousands, than all the Anti Corn leaguers can ever
accomplish, even were they to realise all their members so fully anticipate, & we shall
thus obtain the auxiliary aid of a class of countrymen, whom we have hitherto left
to the worst foes of our species.1
Thompson's assertion of the virtual identity of the three concepts of
Christianity, civilization and commerce was no more than an exaggerated
statement of an amalgam which was integral to the early Victorian understanding of Britain's world mission. The precepts of Christianity, it was
believed, furnished ' a complete moral machinery for carrying forward all the
great processes which lie at the root of civilization'.2 To bring to the 'heathen'
the gospel of the cross of Christ was to open before them not only the prospect
of eternal life but also the road to unlimited social and economic development.3
* An earlier version of this article was read to Professor D. E. D. Beales' and Dr H. M. Pelling's
seminar on modern British history in Cambridge on 11 February 1980.1 wish to thank the Church
Missionary Society, the Council for World Mission, and the Methodist Church, Overseas Division
(Methodist Missionary Society) for permission to consult and cite from their respective archives.
1
Thompson to Wesleyan missionary secretaries, 11 Feb. 1842, W.M.M.S. home letters,
Methodist Missionary Society archives, School of Oriental and African Studies (hereafter
M.M.S.A.). For Thompson see J. Thompson, Sketches of the life and character of Thomas Thompson
(London, 1868).
8
Rev. W. Ellis in D. Coates, J. Beecham, and W. Ellis, Christianity the means of civilization: shown
in the evidence given before a committee of the house of commons, on aborigines (London, 1837), p . 175.
3
The ablest recent exposition of this theme is Niel Gunson, Messengers of grace: evangelical
missionaries in the South Seas 1797-1860 (Melbourne, 1978), pp. 267-79.
71
72
BRIAN STANLEY
The crusading slogan of ' commerce and Christianity' which posterity has
come to associate with the name of David Livingstone was not peculiar to
Livingstone but rather encapsulated a widespread set of assumptions about
the nature of Britain's civilizing mission. This article will attempt to answer
two questions suggested by this theme. Firstly, what was the theological and
ideological background which enabled early Victorian Christians to regard the
association of commerce and Christianity as such a natural and harmonious
alliance? The second and more far-reaching quesfion is this: how far did
the easy rhetorical conjunction of 'commerce and Christianity' reflect a
measurable relationship between the enthusiasms of the missionary movement
and that phenomenon which most historians, at least, have now agreed to
label 'the imperialism of free trade'? 4
II
The Christianity which espoused the ideal of' commerce and Christianity' was
Christianity of a fundamentally evangelical variety. Nineteenth-century evangelical Christians consciously repudiated the spiritual sterility of eighteenthcentury rational religion, yet at the same time they incorporated a great deal
of eighteenth-century rationalism and mechanism into their philosophical
system.5 The intellectual structure of evangelicalism remained essentially
Newtonian, and the corner-stone of the structure was the doctrine of
providence.6 God was the supreme governor of the universe. His governance
was ordinarily reflected, not in a series of arbitrary divine interpositions in the
natural order, but in the regular operation of the natural order according to
the natural laws which God had imposed upon it. What was true of God's
physical government was necessarily true also of his moral government:
history, like the world of nature, proceeded according tofixedrules of operation
towards the fulfilment of the purposes of the divine architect. The essence of
divine providence was that God's physical government was subordinate to the
purposes of his moral government, which thus found observable expression in
the distribution of rewards and punishments both to individuals and to
nations.7 Thus far the evangelical world picture was a characteristically
4
This article is not intended primarily as a contribution to the continuing debate regarding
the meaning and validity of the concept of'the imperialism of free trade'. The article assumes
the legitimacy of the term as a device for describing the concern and agitation of British mercantile
interests for wider and more secure access to distant markets or sources of raw material in the
period under discussion. For the most relevant recent defences of the concept see D. A. Farnie,
The English cotton industry and the world market i8i^-i8gS (Oxford, 1979); V. A. C. Gatrell, 'The
commercial middle class in Manchester, c. 1820-1857' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge,
1972); Peter Harnetty, Imperialism and free trade: Lancashire and India in the mid-nineteenth century
(Manchester, 1972); A. W. Silver, Manchester men and Indian cotton 1847-1872 (Manchester, 1966).
* See Haddon Willmer, 'Evangelicalism 1785 to 1835' (Hulsean prize essay, 1962, Cambridge
University Library), passim; also my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 'Home support for overseas
missions in early Victorian England, c. 1838-1873' (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 118-55.
6
See Roger Anstey, The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition 1760-1810 (London, 1975), p.
158; Willmer, 'Evangelicalism', p. 82
7
James M'Cosh, The method of the divine government, physical and moral (2nd edn, Edinburgh and
London, 1850), pp. 203, 233-8.
'COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY'
73
eighteenth-century one, but superimposed upon a mechanistic understanding
of divine providence was a peculiarly evangelical insistence upon the priority
of one divine purpose over all others: all the operations of providence were
directed towards the end that the earth should be full of the knowledge of the
Lord.8 Human history was the story of the divine preoccupation with the
furtherance of the gospel of salvation. God directed all human affairs with this
one supreme goal in view. The much-cited passage in Livingstone's Missionary
travels and researches in-South Africa, claiming that 'the end of the geographical
feat' was the beginning of the missionary enterprise, conformed precisely to
evangelical orthodoxy in so far as it emphasized the great diversity of means
which God in his providence was employing to bring 'all His dealings with
man to a glorious consummation'. 9
Nineteenth-century evangelicals thus approached the theatre of history with
an intensely teleological perspective. The master of teleological argument,
William Paley, had founded his natural theology upon the assertion that
evidence of contrivance and design in any set of natural circumstances
indicated that those circumstances had been so ordered by providence with
a specific purpose in mind.10 Natural theology dictated that order implied
purpose, and furthermore that the purpose behind any display of order must
needs be commensurate with the evident grandeur of the design. Paley's logic
ofnatural history was equally applicable to human history. Victorian Christians
reflected on the sheer immensity of the power and territorial possessions
granted to Britain, and concluded that it was inconsistent with any ' rational
idea of a superintending and benevolent Providence' that their country should
be thus exalted among the nations merely to satisfy the carnal motives of
national self-aggrandizement.11 The purpose behind the bestowal of such signal
privilege and influence could be no other than that Britain was to be uniquely
'God's almoner in scattering the seeds of virtue and happiness throughout the
world'.12 Moreover, in the providentialist scheme, it was precisely those series
of events which to the human eye appeared to be the most fortuitous and
unintended which exhibited the plainest evidence of the divine hand at work.
The remarkably haphazard nature of the extension of British formal control
in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in India, in which the actions of
'men on the spot' repeatedly presented London with a virtualfait accompli, was
hailed by Christian observers as an unmistakable indication of divine
overruling.13 Many missionary supporters, especially nonconformists, had little
8
Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 3rd ser., xxm (1844), 402.
• David Livingstone, Missionary travels and researches in South Africa (London, 1857), pp. 673-4.
What may have caused some disquiet in evangelical minds was the fact that Livingstone's
definition of the 'glorious consummation' was in terms of'amelioration' and 'elevation' without
explicit reference to spiritual salvation.
10
W. Paley, Natural theology, in The works of William Paley, D.D. (7 vols., London, 1825), v,
2, 10-11, and The principles of moral and political philosophy in ibid, iv, 46.
11
1!
Evangelical Magazine, new ser. xxi (1843), 90.
Ibid. 90.
13
See William Clarkson, India and the gospel: or, an empire for the Messiah (London, 1850), pp.
291-302; Henry Rowley (ed.), Speeches on missions: by the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D.,
74
BRIAN STANLEY
principled enthusiasm for the extension of imperial commitments; but such
extension, alarming though it might be, continued to take place, and only a
purpose of divine dimensions could explain the process. Providence theory may,
as Anstey has pointed out, provide a peculiar dynamic to Christian activism,
but it has an equal and opposing tendency to incline Christians to a
retrospective acceptance of historical development.14
The late seventeenth-century Newtonian exponents of providence theory
had explained the indistinct nature of God's providential action to human eyes
as a consequence of the disruptive effect on the divine creation of the
disobedience of God's rational creature, man. 15 If this emphasis had been
somewhat lost during the eighteenth century, it was recovered by the
evangelicals' awareness of the all-pervasive disorganizing effect of human sin.
It was the fact of the Fall which accounted for the apparent anomalies in the
operations of providence, and made providence, in the words of Melvill Home,
'a mysterious book, not easily legible, and best understood when read
backward'. 18 Human sinfulness complicated but did not frustrate the workings
of providence. God made even the wrath of man to praise him.17 He was the
supreme legislator, able to employ even the selfish and acquisitive motivations
of men to promote the general good - which, to an evangelical, meant
supremely the spread of the gospel.
The evangelical understanding of God could thus on occasion display
markedly Benthamite characteristics. The evangelicals expressed little overt
sympathy for secular utilitarianism; evangelical moral philosophers such as
Thomas Chalmers and Ralph Wardlaw took Hume and Paley to task for
grounding moral obligation in utility alone. Their criticism, however, left intact
the fundamental assumption of eighteenth-century natural law theory that a
uniform harmony of duty and interest was built into the structure of the
universe; personal happiness, although not the ground of duty, was the
divinely-guaranteed consequence of its performance.18 Just as the latitudinarians of the late seventeenth century opposed the unbridled self-interest of
Hobbist ethics with a Christian ethic which retained a positive providential
late Bishop of Winchester (London, 1874), p. 97; George Smith, Our national relations with China: being
two speeches delivered in Exeter Hall and in the Free-Trade Hall, Manchester, by the Bishop of Victoria
(London, 1857), pp. 5-7.
14
Cf. Anstey, Atlantic slave trade, pp. 173-5; Charles D. Cashdollar, ' The social implications
of the doctrine of divine providence: a nineteenth-century debate in American theology', Harvard
Theological Review, LXXI, 3-4 (1978), 265-84; P. B. Hinchliff, 'Mission and Empire (especially in
Africa) 1815-1873' (Hulsean lectures, 1975, Cambridge University Library), p. 18; Margaret C.
Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720 (Ithaca, New York, 1976), passim.
16
Jacob, The Newtonians, p. 193.
16
Melvill H o m e , Letters on missions; addressed to the Protestant ministers of the British churches (Bristol,
1794), pp. 77-8.
17
Psalm 76: 10.
18
See Chalmers' preface to Thomas Brown's Lectures on ethics (Edinburgh, 1846), pp. xiv-xv,
xx; and R. Wardlaw, Christian ethics; or moral philosophy on the principles of divine revelation (2nd edn,
London, 1834), pp. 228-39. Chalmers' lectures and publications were probably the most
important single channel whereby the tenets of utilitarianism and political economy were mediated
to the evangelical world.
' C O M M E R C E AND C H R I S T I A N I T Y '
75
role for 'sober self-love', so nineteenth-century evangelicals responded to
the age of utilitarianism with a moral theology which enshrined 'usefulness' in
the cause of the gospel as chief among the Christian virtues.19 Benevolence,
including benevolence performed by one nation for the benefit of other nations,
initiated a providential reflex action which worked to the benefit of the benefactor.20 The supreme expression of Britian's benevolence towards the world
was, of course, her foreign missionary enterprise.
In a world whose course was shaped by the divine missionary strategy
commerce had a vital part to play. It was the means whereby providence
welded together duty and interest, the channel through which the reflex benefit
of Britain's missionary role in the world returned to her own advantage.
Evangelicals were conscious that the gospel was ' good news' which depended
upon means of communication for its propagation. Isolation and self-sufficiency
were the greatest obstacles to its progress. Nations such as China which prided
themselves on their independence and repudiated contact with the rest of
the world were thereby closed to the gospel. Conversely, communication
between nations must tend to promote the spread of the gospel. Livingstone's
confidence in commerce derived from his belief that it taught the nations
'lessons of mutual dependence': 21
When a tribe begins to trade with another it feels a sense of mutual dependence; and
this is a most important aid in diffusing the blessings of Christianity, because one tribe
never goes to another without telling the news, and the Gospel comes in to be part of
their news, and the knowledge of Christianity is thus spread by means of commerce.22
'Commerce', Samuel Wilberforce told a meeting on behalf of the Oxford and
Cambridge Mission to Central Africa in 1859, 'is a mighty machinery laid
down in the wants of man by the Almighty Creator of all things, to promote
the intercourse and communion of one race with another, and especially of the
more civilised races of the earth with the less civilised. ' 23 Wilberforce nevertheless
acknowledged, as missionary theorists of his day were quick to do, that the
'mighty machinery' of commerce would not achieve its providential purpose
unless it were harnessed to Christianity. 2i Livingstone himself attached the
same proviso to his faith in the potential of commerce;25 commerce could be
19
J a c o b , The Newtonians, p . 6 8 ; I a n Bradley, The call to seriousness: the evangelical impact on the
Victorians (London, 1976), p p . 2 4 - 5 ; Gunson, Messengers of grace, p p . 3 3 - 4 , 181—2.
™ See J o h n Harris, The great commission: or the Christian church constituted and charged to convey the
gospel to the world (London, 1842), p. 229; Wardlaw, Christian ethics, pp. 290-1. For a fuller discussion
of the importance of the ' reflex' principle in Victorian missionary theory see my ' Home support
for overseas missions', pp. 145-54.
21
Livingstone, Missionary travels, p. 674. Livingstone's concept of commerce as a providential
institution for furthering mutual dependence and human brotherhood was far from novel: see
Jacob Viner, The role of providence in the social order: an essay in intellectual history (Memoirs of the
American Philosophical Society, vol. xc, Philadelphia, 1972), passim. Viner is, however, surely
incorrect in his conclusion (p. 50) that the providentialist idea of commerce was rare in the
2Z
nineteenth century.
The Times, 23 Sept. 1857, p. 9.
83
M
Rowley (ed.), Speeches on missions, pp. 176-7.
Ibid. pp. 177-8.
15
Livingstone considered the Indian Mutiny to be the fruit of Britain's neglect of the principle
that Christianity and commerce should always accompany one another as agents of civilization;
76
BRIAN STANLEY
expected to spread the gospel only if one of the trading partners was a Christian
people trading according to Christian principles.
No such reservation, however, was attached to the confidence of midnineteenth-century Christians that the missionary impact on' heathen' societies
would inevitably lead to a mutually beneficial commercial relationship
between those societies and the sending country. Reciprocity and mutual
dependence were the law of the Newtonian universe.26 Christianity was God's
500
3
400
1
,858.,859. J860 ' . 8 ^ ^ < r 8 «
•1862
E
300
1842.
200
•
»f»»aJ^rt84v
1837. .1838
.1836
1835,
100
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
1100
1200
Consumers expenditure (£ millions)
Fig. i. Scatter diagram showing aggregate income of five missionary societies
plotted against consumers' expenditure, 1835-75
appointed engine of civilization; civilizing the heathen meant introducing
them to clothing and ' industrious habits'; Christianity thus brought commerce
in its train, and the Christian nation was given tangible reward for its
obedience to the missionary imperative.27 The Victorian churches, which had
been compelled to adjust their domestic strategies in order to come to terms
with the advent of free trade in religion, marketed their gospel to the world
as the commodity of surpassing value, confident that providence would honour
a faithful performance of their duty with a substantial return on their
investment.
see W. Monk (ed.), Dr Livingstone's Cambridge lectures (London, 1858), p. 21, and Livingstone to
Tidman, 12 Oct. 1855, in I. Schapera (ed.), Livingstone's missionary correspondence 1841-1856
(London, 1961), pp. 301-2.
" See Harris, The great commission, pp. 3-11.
27
For two good examples of this belief see Coates et al., Christianity the means of civilization, pp.
167-70, 183; cf. Farnie, English cotton industry, pp. 84-5, Gunson, Messengers of grace, pp. 274-6.
'COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY'
77
III
The remainder of this article will attempt to discover how this complex of
theological and economic attitudes worked itself out in terms of the relationship
between English missionary enthusiasm and commercial expectations in the
period 1842-60. Missionary enthusiasm is an elusive quantity not easily
subjected to objective measurement. An index of an approximate kind might
be provided by compiling annual totals of candidates volunteering for
missionary service; unfortunately such statistics are readily available for only
one of the five major English societies - the Church Missionary Society
(C.M.S.) - and then only from 1851 onwards.28 An alternative index of
measurement exists in the series of annual home income from voluntary sources
of the missionary societies. Charitable giving, of course, is determined not
simply by the disposition to give but also by the capacity to give. Figure 1
is an attempt to eliminate some of the effects of economic fluctuation from
the available gross series of society income. It represents a computed regression
analysis in which the aggregate income of the five societies from 1835 t o '875
was regressed against the estimated volume of national income in the private
sector of the economy, as measured by a series of estimates of consumers'
expenditure for this period.29 The scatter diagram is designed to measure the
divergence of the actual values of aggregate giving from the values which would
be predicted if the amounts of money in the pockets of the public were assumed
to be the only determinant of the level of missionary giving. The interest of
the diagram thus lies in those years in which the actual values of missionary
giving were significantly above the trend line, representing the notional values
predicted on the basis of the level of consumers' expenditure. It would clearly
be hazardous to draw conclusions solely on the basis of data of this nature, but,
taken in association with evidence of a different kind, the diagram, it may be
suggested, is of some value.
The late 1830s were a period of escalating missionary optimism and rapid
missionary expansion.30 The abolitionist campaign had fuelled the fires of
missionary zeal, and anti-slavery was the animating impulse of that characteristic expression of the 'commerce and Christianity' ideal - T. F. Buxton's
m
The five societies are the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.), Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel (S.P.G.), Baptist Missionary Society (B.M.S.), London Missionary Society (L.M.S.)
and Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (W.M.M.S.). Annual totals of applicants to the
C.M.S. from 1851 (dated according to the date at which a candidate's application first came before
a committee of the society) can be compiled from the register of candidates (C/A Tms), Church
Missionary Society archivQp, London (hereafter C.M.S.A.).
" Phyllis Deane, 'New estimates of Gross National Product for the United Kingdom 18301914', Review of Income and Wealth, xiv, 2 (1968), 104-5. The aggregate series of missionary society
income was compiled from the following sources: B.M.S. annual reports; The centenary volume of the
Church Missionary Society (London, 1902), p p . 7 1 4 - 1 5 ; Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society;
R. Lovett, The history of the London Missionary Society J795—JS95 (2 vols., London, 1899), I, 752-4;
L.M.S. annual reports; S.P.G. reports; W.M.M.S. reports. For fuller details of the income series used
see my 'Home support for overseas missions', pp. 74-5.
30
For a fuller discussion see my 'Home support for overseas missions', pp. 25-9.
78
BRIAN STANLEY
Niger expedition. The prospect of a holy alliance between ' the Bible and the
Plough' to regenerate Africa and banish the ungodly traffic of the slave trade
temporarily focused the enthusiasm of the religious public on West Africa.31
Although the ignominious failure of the expedition ensured that West Africa
soon receded from the British missionary conscience, Christian confidence in
the pattern of missionary regeneration exemplified by Buxton's project
remained intact.
In 1842 British missionary enthusiasm received a major stimulus from an
entirely different quarter. On 29 August 1842 the signing of the treaty of
Nanking heralded the partial opening of the celestial empire to Western
influence. Jubilant manufacturers in Manchester hastily erected new mills in
anticipation of a new export market of vast proportions.32 But commercial
excitement was matched if not surpassed by religious excitement. The countless
millions of the Chinese population exercised a peculiar fascination on the
Christian imagination.33 The fact that China had been opened by means of
a war whose immediate occasion gave missionary supporters acute moral
embarrassment does not appear to have diminished their enthusiasm for its
outcome; indeed, it revealed the working of divine providence the more clearly.
God had, in characteristic fashion, chosen to use 'the instrumentality of evils
which have arisen through the sin of man and the devices of Satan' in other
words, the opium trade - for the accomplishment of his benevolent purposes
towards China.34 Even a leading peace advocate such as the congregationalist
John Angell James adhered to this view while continuing to denounce the
injustice of the war.35 There must have been some purpose behind the opium
war, and, moreover, some purpose which was consistent with the known
character of God's government. Samuel Wilberforce told a missionary meeting
in 1846 that it was tantamount to denying the government of God to suggest
that Britain had been led by providence into war with China merely in order
to achieve a minimal reduction in the price of tea.36 The divine purpose behind
even the iniquities of the opium trade and the injustice of the opium war was
that China might be opened to the soldiers of the cross.
There is evidence that the missionary societies faced substantial pressure
81
P. D. Curtin, The image of Africa: British ideas and action, 1780-1850 (London, 1965), pp.
298-318; J. A. Gallagher, 'Fowell Buxton and the new African policy, 1838-1842', Cambridge
Historical Journal, x , 1 (1950), 4 5 - 9 .
32
Gatrell, 'The commercial middle class', pp. 457-8.
33
Active missionary interest in China had arisen only within the decade prior to 1842. The
awakening of interest in China was due primarily to the publicity of the free-lance Pomeranian
missionary, K a r l Giitzlaff; see H . Schlyter, Der China-Missionar Karl Giitzlaffund seine Heimat-basis:
Studien iiber das Interesse des Abendlandes an der Mission des China-Pioniers Karl Giitzlaff und iiber seinen
Einsatz als Missionserwecker (Uppsala, 1976), p p . 28-37.
M
Church Missionary Intelligencer, 1, 19(1850), 444.
3S
J- A. J a m e s , God's voicefrom China to the British and Irish churches, both established and unestablished,
in The works of John Angell James, edited by his son (17 vols., London, 1862), xvi, 481. In this
pamphlet, published in 1858, James denounced both opium wars but insisted that God had made
both wars subservient to his purposes.
3
* Rowley (ed.), Speeches on missions, p. 98.
' COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY '
79
from their constituencies from November 1842 to January 1843 to disregard
financial constraints and commence operations in China.37 The London
Missionary Society (L.M.S.) declared the call of providence to be unmistakable and promptly opened a special China fund; by the end of March 1843 the
fund stood at j£7,743-38 The C.M.S. was hampered by financial crisis and, to
the manifest displeasure of many of its supporters, declined to commence a
China mission; but a single donation of £6,000 soon enabled the society to
reverse its decision.3* China dominated the horizons of missionary thinking
from late 1842 until at least 1845. In September 1845 the anniversary
meeting of the Leeds auxiliary of the L.M.S. resolved:
That this meeting must still chiefly at the present conjuncture feel the overwhelming
responsibility of the oriental demands and facilities which press upon its attention:
learning with an indefinable impression of awe and amazement how Providence has
suddenly opened China, with its third of the human race to Missionary enterprize.40
The expectations aroused by the opening of the Chinese treaty ports had
a very significant impact on the level of missionary giving. Although in absolute
terms missionary income fluctuated unsteadily in the mid-1840s, aggregate
giving reached an extremely high level relative to consumers' expenditure
between 1843 and 1846 (even without taking special funds for China into
account). However, despite the generous response to the special China appeals,
the societies found candidates hard to come by.41 By the late 1840s the
exaggerated missionary optimism which China had excited in 1843 was waning
in face of the frustrations which baulked missionary as much as commercial
progress in China.42
Providentialist theology enabled the missionary lobby to welcome the
outcome of a war fought in the cause of free trade — a war whose morality they
had consistently condemned. Christian opinion continued to denounce the
opium trade after the opening of China, but now on grounds of missionary
expediency as well as of moral principle. The contrast between British
immorality and the noble resistance of the Chinese emperor to the trade could
be 'held up to the confusion of our Missionaries when they attempt to glory
in the cross of Christ'. 43 'Every chest of opium that is smuggled into China',
wrote John Angell James, ' is a stone of stumbling thrown in the missionary's
path.' 44 If the opium traffic were so clearly contrary to national duty,
37
The evidence is most substantial for the C.M.S. See incoming home letters (G/AC3), Jan.
to Mar. 1843, and committee minutes (G/C1), xxi, 406-7,470-1, C.M.S. A. See alsoj. S. Workman
to W.M.M.S., 14 Dec. 1842, W.M.M.S. home letters, M.M.S.A.
38
Evangelical Magazine, n e w ser. xxi (1843), 3 9 - 4 2 ; L.M.S. annual report for 1 8 4 2 - 3 , p p . x c i v - x c v .
3
* Eugene Stock, The hfftory of the Church Missionary Society: its environment, its men and its work
(4 vols., London, 1899-1916), 1, 4 7 1 - 2 .
40
Leeds L.M.S. auxiliary, minute book 2 (1834-67), p. 56, L.M.S. auxiliary records, box 2,
Congregational Memorial Hall Library MSS, now in Dr Williams's Library, London.
41
Baptist Magazine, xxxvm (1846), 376; Evangelical Magazine, new ser. xxv (1847), 151.
42
For the parallel disillusionment of commercial expectations see Farnie, English cotton industry,
p. 120; Gatrell, 'The commercial middle class', pp. 458-60.
43
Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 5 t h ser., 11 (1856), 906.
44
J a m e s , God's voice from China, p . 522.
80
BRIAN STANLEY
evangelical logic dictated that it must also be contrary to national interest. Lord
Ashley's motion before the Commons in April 1843 for the suppression of the
trade insisted that it was not only a moral evil but also 'injurious to the
manufacturing interests of the country, by the very serious diminution of
legitimate commerce'. 45 The missionary lobby consistently ignored the
indispensability of the opium shipments to the financing of the tea trade and
the maintenance of Indian revenue, and made opium the scapegoat for the
failure of British manufactures to penetrate the Chinese market on anything
like the scale anticipated in 1842-3. The Bishop of Victoria assured a C.M.S.
meeting held in the Free-Trade Hall, Manchester, in 1857 that English
manufactures were being' beaten out of the field by the stronger force of sensual
temptation'. 46
Two pamphlets published in 1856-7 gave this view wider currency, accusing
the contraband opium trade of impoverishing China to the tune of four million
pounds per annum and thereby depressing the prices of Western manufactures.47 In 1858 a pamphlet by the Rev. William Tait took the case a stage
further by arguing that the Indian land used for the cultivation of opium could
instead be devoted to cotton and sugar, in order to lessen Britain's dependence
on the slave economies of America and Cuba. ' Wisdom and righteousness
are one', asserted Tait - 'Wickedness is always FOLLY. ' 48 Quaint as this line of
argument may appear, it may have appealed to the sizeable section of the
British mercantile community which had designs on the Chinese market
but no interest in the opium trade. In 1843 Lord Ashley had been at pains
to remind the Commons that a memorial to the first lord of the treasury for
the cessation of the opium trade, presented in July 1842, had been signed by
230 'great firms', of whom 114 were from Lancashire.49 The most significant
aspect of Christian opinion on the opium trade is the increasing willingness
of missionary advocates to harness the cause of the gospel to the aspirations
of free trade imperialism. To the evangelical, the illegitimate commerce of the
slave or opium trades was not only sinful in itself but demonstrably also an
obstacle to missionary progress. In Africa, evangelical strategy prescribed
legitimate commerce as the means of extirpating the slave trade; in China, on
the other hand, it was the bad trade which was believed to have driven out
the good; but in both cases the distinctive evangelical blend of providentialism
45
E. Hodder, The life and work of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. (3 vols., London, 1886),
1, 467-8; see 3 Hansard, LXVIII (4 Apr. 1843), cols. 362-405.
41
S m i t h , Our national relations with China, p . 2 1 .
47
R . Alexander, The rise and progress of British opium smuggling, audits effects upon India, China and
the commerce of Great Britain. Four letters addressed to the Right Honourable the Earl of Shaftesbury (London,
1856); idem, Opium revenue of India: the question answered, that it is not right to break the laws of England
and of China, and injure the commerce of both countries, for the sake of temporarily obtaining £3,000,000
sterling, by destroying the lives of, morality and commercial reciprocity of 300,000,000 of our fellow-men
(London, 1857).
48
William T a i t , Appeal to the British nation against the opium traffic, in four letters (London, 1858),
p p . 14-16. T a i t ' s a r g u m e n t s were used by J o h n Angell J a m e s in God's voicefrom China, p p . 5 1 8 - 2 1 .
49
3 Hansard, LXVIII (4 A p r . 1843), cols. 3 7 5 - 6 .
' C O M M E R C E AND
CHRISTIANITY'
8I
and utilitarianism was inclining Christians to perceive a natural alliance
between the gospel and free trade.
During the early and mid-1850s missionary enthusiasm was at a low ebb.80
Most of the moral crusades which had once stoked the fires of missionary zeal
had had their day.81 Stagnant or falling levels of missionary giving between
1853 and 1855 were attributed to high prices, heavy war taxation, and the
additional demands on public benevolence created by the Crimean War.82 But
a virtual drying-up of the flow of missionary candidates indicated a more
profound malaise in the missionary spirit.53 In 1857 two influences combined
to reverse the process - David Livingstone and the Indian Mutiny.
IV
Although Livingstone returned to England after his trans-continental African
journey in December 1856, it was not until the end of August 1857 that he
emerged from a seclusion devoted to writing his Missionaty travels and researches
in South Africa to take up public engagements.54 Livingstone chose his audiences
with care in the closing months of 1857: few missionary meetings enjoyed the
benefit of his oratory. The meeting at the Town Hall, Manchester, on 9 September set the tone: members of the Chamber of Commerce, the Commercial
Association and the newly-founded Cotton Supply Association constituted the
audience, while the platform was adorned with such local eminences as Sir
James Watts, John Cheetham, M.P., J. A. Turner, M.P., George Hadfield,
M.P., and Henry and Edmund Ashworth.55 Henry Ashworth presented
Livingstone with an address of welcome and congratulation on behalf of the
Chamber of Commerce. Having complimented Livingstone on his labours for
the extension of civilization and Christianity in Africa, the address proceeded:
Believing that commerce and industry may be identified with civilization and
Christianity, the directors of this chamber are desirous of expressing to you their strong
s0
51
See my 'Home support for overseas missions' pp. 40-2.
For the decline of the British abolitionist movement in the 1850s see Douglas A. Lorimer,
Colour, class and the Victorians: English attitudes to the Negro in the mid-nineteenth century (Leicester, 1978),
pp. 71, 117; Harold W. Temperley, British antislavery 1833-1870 (London, 1972), pp. 221-31.
a
Baptist Magazine, XLVI (1854), 653, XLVII (1855), 331; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 5th ser.,
1 (I 8 55). 5 6 8 - Of the five English societies, only the C.M.S. and the W.M.M.S. showed some
increase of income in 1854. Fig. 1 suggests that 1854 was a trough in aggregate missionary giving
relative to consumer's expenditure.
83
The numbers of L.M.S. recruits sent to the field dwindled almost to nothing in the mid-i85os;
see my 'Home support for overseas missions', p. 64. The C.M.S. received only 36 applications
from candidates in Great Britain and Ireland in 1855, compared with an average of over 60 per
annum for the previous three years, and complained in January 1856 of'an absolute dearth of
candidates' (register of candidates 1850-1859 (C/ATm^),C.M.S.A.;Church
Missionary Intelligencer,
VII, 1 (1856), 15).
54
G. Seaver, David Livingstone: his life and letters (London, 1957), pp. 281-7.
56
The Times, 10 Sept. 1857, p. 10. Sir James Watts was mayor of Manchester at the time, and
took the chair at the meeting. Turner was a correspondent of Livingstone's and may have been
his main contact with the Manchester commercial community; see G. W. Clendennen and
I. C. Cunningham (eds.), David Livingstone: a catalogue of documents (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 234.
82
BRIAN STANLEY
conviction that cotton and other agricultural products which are required in this
country may, with great advantage to the native African, be grown by him to exchange
for British manufactures, and by encouraging pursuits of productive labour they submit
that missionary objects may be supported, while the material comfort and enjoyment
of the people of Africa may be rendered commensurate with those reasonable desires
which increased intelligence always suggests.56
Livingstone responded with predictable enthusiasm to this distillation of his
own ideals for the regeneration of Africa by a marriage of missionary and
commercial enterprise to the mutual benefit of Africa and Britain. Similar
meetings followed in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham,
Oxford, and finally Cambridge.57 Whether his audience comprised Manchester
cotton men or Cambridge undergraduates, Livingstone's message contained
one common theme: in the commercial and agricultural development of the
Zambezi region, he insisted, lay the solution to the moral and commercial
dilemma which confronted the British cotton manufacturer, namely his excessive dependence on supplies of American slave-grown cotton.58 Providence,
Livingstone assured his Glasgow audience, was now indicating a way out of
the dilemma:
Commerce shows to us that we are dependent upon others; but with the heathens there
is no such thing... I believe that the restriction upon trade in our own country was but
a remnant of heathenism, but it has now been happily removed (Laughter and
cheers)... And now that we feel a want of cotton, and now that a new field has been
opened up, I look upon it as quite a Providential development, and we ought to direct
our commerce so as to influence in its course those great evils which exist among our
friends across the Atlantic (Cheers).59
Livingstone was not averse to playing to the free trade gallery. But the
argument that Zambezi free-grown cotton could strike a death-blow to
American slavery was no mere tactical device designed to obtain the support
of manufacturing interests for Livingstone's Central African programme.
Livingstone deployed this argument in Cambridge as well as in Manchester,
in Edinburgh as well as in Glasgow. He firmly believed that the unseen hand
of providence had led him to open up the Zambezi interior.60 The economic
advantage of British manufacturers could not of itself be a sufficient object of
such marked providential interposition, just as, for Samuel Wilberforce, the
reduction of the price of tea could not conceivably be a worthy object of the
divine purpose behind the first opium war. The campaign for the repeal of the
corn laws had established in the minds of many nonconformists an intimate
" The Times, 10 Sept. 1857, p. 10.
;
" Seaver, Livingstone, pp. 287-9' > f° r reports of the Glasgow and Edinburgh meetings see The
Times, 18 Sept. 1857, p. 10, and 23 Sept. 1857, p. g, respectively; for Livingstone's Cambridge
lectures see Monk (ed.) Livingstone's Cambridge lectures; and for a general assessment of Livingstone's
appeal see Owen Chadwick, Mackenzie's grave (London, 1959), pp. 13-16.
68
See Farnie, English cotton industry, pp. 30-1, 43; Lorimer, Colour, class and the Victorians, pp.
121-2; Silver, Manchester men, passim.
51
The Times, 18 Sept. 1857, p. 10.
•° Livingstone, Missionary travels, pp. 677-8; Monk (ed.), Livingstone's Cambridge lectures, pp. 43-4.
•
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' COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY '
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connexion between the free trade cause and the American abolitionist
movement.61 Although repeal in 1846 failed to achieve the anticipated
substitution of 'free wheat' for slave-grown cotton as the major American
export commodity,62 one legacy of the repeal campaign to nonconformist minds
was an enduring conviction that free trading interest and abolitionist duty must
ultimately coincide in providential harmony, however much immediate
appearances might suggest the contrary. Livingstone was able to utilize this
tradition to argue that the purpose of God in opening up Central Africa was
not merely the suppression of the slave trade within Africa but ultimately also
the elimination of slavery from the North American continent: the commercial
development of the Zambezi was an integral part of the divine strategy for the
salvation of Africa and the liberation of the sons of Africa in America.63
Livingstone had persuaded the L.M.S. to launch an appeal for two new
missions on either side of the Zambezi - to the Makololo on the north and the
Matabele on the south.64 But if Livingstone hoped to attract extensive
commercial support for the new missions, he was sorely disappointed.
Subscription lists indicate that even the leading nonconformist merchants and
manufacturers of Manchester made very little response to the appeal.65 To
applaud Livingstone in a crowded public meeting was one thing; to invest in
the chimerical prospect of the Zambezi region becoming a major cotton
producer was quite another; moreover the imperial interests of the Manchester
commercial community were as yet more closely related to the search for
new markets than to the discovery of new sources of cotton supply.66 The
£7,000 which had been contributed to the L.M.S Central South Africa fund
by the end of March 1858 represented the enthusiastic response of the religious
public, not the shrewd investment of Lancashire cotton men.67
Livingstone's propaganda on behalf of Central Africa was, however, taken
up by an ecclesiastic whose very name made him one of the most powerful
anti-slavery advocates in England - Samuel Wilberforce. Wilberforce was in
correspondence with Livingstone by November 1857,68 and by May 1858 was
impressing missionary meetings with the Livingstone argument connecting the
'
\
*
L
-
.
-
•r
83
61
See K..R.M. Short, 'English Baptists and the Corn Laws', Baptist Quarterly, new ser. xxi, 7
(1965-6), 309-20.
62
Farnie, English cotton industry, p. 43.
•* Livingstone, Missionary travels, pp. 678-9; The Times, 10 Sept. 1857, p. 10, 12 Sept. 1857,
p. 6, 18 Sept. 1857, p. 10, 23 Sept. 1857, p. 9; cf. Lorimer, Colour, class and the Victorians, pp. 70-2.
M
Timjeal, Livingstone (London, 1973), pp. 168-9.
" Of the funds contributed by the E. Lanes. L.M.S. auxiliary for the Zambezi mission, the only
recorded donations of £ 5 or over were: T. Barnes - £100; S. Fletcher-£50; R. Topp - £30; Sir
E. Armitage (the only one of the four whom I have identified as a member of the cotton interest) - £ 5
(L.M.S. annual report for 1857-8, pp. 1-lii). This level of contribution is in marked contrast to the
response to the special India fund in 1858-60; see n. 102 below.
«• Gatrell, 'The commercial middle class', pp. 319-21, 364-6, 400, 412; Silver, Manchester men,
p. 158; but cf. Farnie, English cotton industry, p. 87.
" L.M.S. annual report for 1857-8, p. 2.
•» Livingstone to Wilberforce, 23 Nov. 1857, Bodleian MS Wilberforce c. 12, fos. 83-4. This
is the earliest of several letters from Livingstone to Wilberforce listed in Clendennen and
Cunningham (eds.), David Livingstone, p. 251.
84
BRIAN STANLEY
commercial prospects of the Zambezi with American slavery.69 Wilberforce
lent his enthusiastic support to the Oxford and Cambridge Mission to Central
Africa, formed in 1858-9 on the initiative of Bishop Gray of Capetown and
Livingstone's Cambridge contact, William Monk;70 like Livingstone,
Wilberforce was convinced that God was calling Britain to a Christian and
commercial mission which united the nation's duty to the whole African race
with her own material interests.71 In October 1859 Wilberforce told a
missionary meeting in Exeter that he had recently* received a letter from
Livingstone urging him to stir up support for Livingstone's plans for the
Zambezi.' 2 In May i860 Wilberforce, accompanied by the anti-slavery
veteran, Lord Brougham, addressed public meetings in Manchester, Liverpool
and Leeds to raise funds for the new mission.73 The response of the manufacturing
and business communities appears to have been rather more positive than it
was to Livingstone's appeals in 1857. In Manchester the Unitarian Sir
Benjamin Heywood gave £100, and his two sons £50 each - to a High
Anglican mission.74 In Liverpool Wilberforce secured the patronage of Sir
William Brown, former Liberal M.P. for South Lancashire, and the mission's
first subscription list displays a considerable number of small to middling
contributions from representatives of the Liverpool cotton importing and
broking community.78 Wilberforce had at least some success in persuading
northern commercial interests that the gospel and free trade were to march
hand-in-hand into Central Africa.
David Livingstone returned to Africa in March 1858 anxious that the
enthusiasm he had aroused for Africa was about to be overshadowed by the
'intense interest in India' which the outbreak of the Mutiny had created.76
The missionary lobby immediately hailed the Mutiny as divine retribution for
the East India Company's compromising religious policy.77 Britain had given
*• R o w l e y (ed.), Speeches on missions, p p . 1 5 7 - 8 .
70
See David Neave, 'Aspects of the history of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa,
1858-1900' (unpublished M. Phil, thesis, York, 1974), chs. I and II. The name 'Universities'
Mission to Central Africa' was not used until 1865.
71
Rowley (ed.), Speeches on missions, pp. 31-2, 157-8, 183-4, 213-1472
Ibid. p . 3 1 . This letter is not listed in Clendennen and C u n n i n g h a m (eds.), David Livingstone,
and is presumably therefore not extant.
" Rowley (ed.), Speeches on missions, pp. 187-216; Neave, 'History of the U.M.C.A.', p. 41.
74
Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin and Durham Mission to Central Africa: report to the31st December i860
(London, 1861), p. 69; Neave, 'History of the U.M.C.A.', p. 41, computes that the mission
received £1180 in contributions from Liverpool, £740 from Manchester, and £200 from Leeds.
76
Oxford, Cambridge Dublin and Durham Mission to Central Africa: report to the 31st December i860,
pp. 62—79; s e e t n e table of Liverpool contributions in my 'Home support for overseas missions',
pp. 66-8.
76
Livingstone to Tidman, 22 Feb. 1858, L.M.S. 'Africa Odds', box 10A, Council for World
Mission archives, School of Oriental and African Studies (hereafter C.W.M.A.).
77
See, for e x a m p l e , Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 5th ser. m (1857), 1 0 2 8 - 3 7 , 1130-2, a n d Church
Missionary Intelligencer, v m , n (1857), 2 4 1 - 5 1 .
' C O M M E R C E AND C H R I S T I A N I T Y '
F
I
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1
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[
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•
85
India not too much Christianity but too little. A policy of studied religious
indifference made no sense to the Hindu, and merely heightened his suspicions
that the British harboured well-disguised intentions of forcible conversion.78
If only Britain had 'come clean' and pursued an unashamed and manly
Christian policy, the sepoys would never have mutinied. In the early days of
the Mutiny, in the summer of 1857, the violence of public indignation at the
atrocities inflicted on British subjects prevented this rather ingenious interpretation from gaining a wide currency. The observance of a day of national
fasting and humiliation on 7 October marked the beginning of a shift in public
opinion.79
On 7 October pulpits of every ecclesiastical and theological complexion
hammered home the message that only a Christian policy could save India.80
Two days later, E. E.Jenkins, a Wesleyan missionary about to sail for India,
agreed to postpone his departure in order that he might 'improve' the current
excitement about India 'for the advantage of our Missions': 'God is putting
words of concession and encouragement even into mouths that twelve months
ago were silent in contempt or loud in condemnation of the Gospel mission
in India. ' 81 Jenkins attended a series of Wesleyan missionary meetings in Leeds
later in October, and was astounded by the spirit manifested: 'The collections
have amounted to two thousand and ten pounds!.. .My heart has been greatly
stirred by Missionary sympathy and I have witnessed scenes I cannot ever
forget. ' 82 The evangelical understanding of the Mutiny was rendered still more
acceptable by the fact that the military heroes of the Mutiny were, almost
without exception, avowed Christians and known supporters of missions Henry Havelock was the supreme example.83 ' It was', claimed Eugene Stock,
' 8 The assertion that the heathen found an ' impartial' religious policy incomprehensible and
unworthy of respect was a frequent missionary response to government insistence on neutrality
and non-interference. See Communications relating to the connexion of the government of British India
with idolatry, or with Mahometanism (Parl. Papers, 1851, XLI), p. 322; Correspondence relating to missionaries and idolatry (East India) (Parl. Papers, 1857-8, XLII), p. 331.
** G. D. Bearce, British attitudes towards India 1784-1858 (London, 1961), pp. 233-9, notes
the shift in public opinion from demands for revenge to a recognition that British Indian policy
had been at fault, but is surely wrong to describe the day of humiliation as 'the apex of British
resentment toward India' (p. 236); see n. 80 below.
80
The best indication of Christian responses to the Mutiny is provided by the numerous reports
of humiliation day sermons in The Times, 8 Oct. 1857, pp. 5-9. A few sermons were preoccupied
with the call for vengeance; a few accepted that the Mutiny was a judgement but held it a presumption to specify what sins had occasioned the judgement; but the majority adhere to the
interpretation here described.
81
Jenkins to Osborn, 9 Oct. 1857, W.M.M.S. home letters, M.M.S.A.
82
Jenkins to Osborn, 29 Oct. 1857, W.M.M.S. home letters, M.M.S.A. See also Hoole,
Osborn and Arthur to Jerikins, 3 Dec. 1857, W.M.M.S. copies of outgoing letters, box 25,
M.M.S.A., in which the missionary secretaries assure the departing Jenkins that 'The results of
recent painful occurrences will probably prove most salutary in many respects, and amidst the
attention now so widely awakened to Indian affairs generally, the Churches of Christ planted there
cannot be exempt.'
88
See Lord Shaftesbury reported in The Times, 2 7 Nov. 1857, p. 10; Baptist Magazine,L (1858),2og,
323; Stock, History of the C.M.S., 11, 217-18; Olive Anderson, 'The growth of Christian militarism
in mid-Victorian Britain', English Historical Review, LXXXVI, 1 (1971), 49-52.
86
BRIAN STANLEY
'the men who were not ashamed of Christ who saved India', 84 and the
missionary societies reaped the harvest of the resulting effusion of Christian
militarism.
The ordinary series of missionary society income manifested a dramatic rise
from 1857 to 1858, bringing to an end the stagnation of the mid-1850s. Fig. 1
suggests that ordinary missionary giving reached an exceptionally high level
in 1858, and remained significantly above average for the next two or three
years.85 Moreover, this analysis takes no account of the funds which poured
in to the special appeals for extension in India which the societies set up. The
C.M.S. raised £50,000 within a few months.86 The L.M.S., having raised
£7,000 for the Zambezi mission in 185 7-8,87 raised nearly £18,000 for India
between February 1858 and May 1859.88 Buoyant missionary giving was
matched by rising missionary recruitment. The L.M.S. noted in April 1858
that 'an unusually large number of suitable men had within the last few weeks
offered themselves for Missionary Service \ 8 9 The C.M.S. received seventy-nine
applications from candidates in Great Britain and Ireland in 1858, more than
in any other year between 1850 and 1875.90
The annual report of the L.M.S. for 1857-8 acknowledged that the marked
extension of public enthusiasm for foreign missions owed even more to the
Mutiny than it did to the influence of Livingstone.91 The Mutiny had aroused
a surge of conversionist zeal which proved more significant than the initial
frenzied demands for revenge, for it brought about a closer convergence of the
missionary movement and the imperialism of free trade than Livingstone had
managed to achieve. To the evangelical mind the national calamity of the
Mutiny was the logical consequence of the dereliction of national duty
represented by the East India Company's active or passive support for Hindu
idolatry.92 Clinching evidence of the intimate connexion between sin and
judgement was found in the case of the sepoy dismissed from the Bengal army
in 1819, merely, it was alleged, because he had sought Christian baptism.93
'Where did this incident take place?', asked the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine
84
Stock, History of the C.M.S., 11, 217.
The computed regression analysis indicated tht 1843 and 1858 were the years in which actual
missionary giving was furthest above the values which would be predicted from the level of
consumers' expenditure.
86
Stock, History of the C.M.S., 11, 263.
" See p. 83 above.
88
Evangelical Magazine, new ser., 1 (1859), 3 3 0 " 1 89
L . M . S . Board minutes, box 33, p . 551, C.W.M.A. T h e observation was m a d e by Arthur
T i d m a n , the Foreign Secretary, in the context of a report o n a recent tour to Manchester,
Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, ' & other places', where T i d m a n h a d met a generous response to
the society's special India appeal, notwithstanding the recent commercial crisis.
90
Register of candidates 1850-1859 ( C / A T m 5 ) , C.M.S.A.
91
L.M.S. annual report for 1857-8, p . 1.
92
' National sins the sources of national calamities', Church Missionary Intelligencer, v m , 11 (1857),
2 4 1 - 5 1 ; for a fuller discussion of the evangelical concept of idolatry see m y ' H o m e support for
overseas missions', p p . 129-36.
93
S e e The Times, 10 O c t . 1857, p . 4 ; Papers connected with the case of the sepoy. ..at Meerut (Parl.
Papers, 1857-8, XLin), pp. 163-4; Arthur Mayhew, Christianity and the government of India (London,
1929), pp. 158-9.
86
'COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY'
8j
triumphantly, 'It was at Meerut; the very place where the flames of mutiny
broke out with a red and fierce glare that lighted the world with consternation.
They who cannot read the lesson of Divine retribution here, are dull indeed.>94
In the light of such evidence it was perfectly clear that the road back to imperial
prosperity followed the path of Christian duty, that a Christian government
of India was 'the only safe policy'.95 'In this, as in almost every case',
pronounced the Rev. B. W. Noel, 'duty and interest are harmonious': the only
security for the Indian empire was a government dedicated to the welfare of
the Indian people, and to their spiritual welfare above all else.96 'All recent
events in India', affirmed the Church Missionary Intelligencer in 1860,' have urged
upon us this lesson... that if we would rule in peace over the heathen entrusted
to our charge, we must give to them the Gospel.>97
Christian government was not, however, the only constituent of the Indian
insurance policy: economic development was equally indispensable. The Times,
which in September 1857 had insisted that the Hindus needed to be punished
before they could be converted,98 was arguing by 18 December that the
religious and economic aspects of India's regeneration were inseparable:
Soon we hope that the country will be intersected by telegraphs, railways, and canals;
that schools will be increased, the use of the English language made general in the public
service, the true principles of physical science expounded, and the whole code of
Christian morality enforced... Let the Government determine to uphold Christianity
as its own religion, and to forbid anything like an abnegation of its principles, and we
have little doubt that the Asiatic will yield obedience in the end."
The demands which confronted Sir Charles Wood, secretary of state for India
in Palmerston's government from June 1859, for the authorization of Bible
classes in government schools represented rather more than the obstinate
preoccupation of a clique of evangelical die-hards.100 The campaign against
religious 'neutrality' ran in parallel with the campaign against Wood's
persistence in a laissez-faire economic policy. The Manchester Chamber of
Commerce and the Cotton Supply Association applied unremitting pressure
on the government in an attempt to obtain the public works and agricultural
policies which were required if India was to become a major source of cotton
supply.101 But some of the leading figures in those bodies were also subscribing
M
Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 5th ser., m (1857), 1036.
[Emma Edwardes], Memorials of the life and letters of Major-General Sir Herbert B. Edwardes
K.C.B., K.C.S.I., by his wife (2 vols., London, 1886), 11, 247; see also Baptist Magazine, XLIX (1857),
759** B. W. Noel, England and India: an essay on the duty of Englishmen towards the Hindoos (London,
1859), p. 25. Cf. E. T. Stoke^, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), pp. 33-4.
" Church Missionary Intelligencer, xi, 7 (i860), 151.
»8 The Times, 18 Sept. 1857, p. 6.
" The Times, 18 Dec. 1857, p. 6; The Times had begun to change its attitude to the missionary
response to the Mutiny as early as October 1857; see 6 Oct. 1857, p. 6, 7 Oct. 1857, p. 8.
100
See Stock, History of the C.M.S., n, 235-61; R. J. Moore, Sir Charles Wood's Indian policy 1853-66
(Manchester, 1966), pp. 118-20. For a markedly different view of the impact of the Mutiny on
British opinion to that advanced in this article see T. R. Metcalf, The aftermath of revolt: India,
1857-1870 (Princeton, 1965), pp. 92-121.
101
Harnetty, Imperialism andfree trade, p. 38; Silver, Manchester men, pp. 97—101, 158.
98
88
BRIAN STANLEY
to the extension of Indian missions:102 if India were to be the economic salvation of Manchester, Manchester must make its contribution to the
spiritual salvation of India.
British capital poured in its millions into Indian railway-building from
1858.103 Although the cotton interest had agitated strongly for the promotion
of railway projects, its willingness to invest in the schemes was distinctly
limited. Most of the capital, writes MacPherson, was provided by prudent
middle-class investors - 'widows, barristers, clergymen, spinsters, bankers, and
retired army officers'104 - in other words, much the same groups as were
conspicuous in support of foreign missions. Missionary organs declared
railways to be the ideal instrument in the hands of providence for the breaking
down of the isolationism which was the most serious obstacle to the gospel in
India's caste-ridden society.105 Missionary supporters could invest in Indian
railways for avowedly evangelistic reasons. The Quaker missionary philanthropist, Robert Arthington, informed the L.M.S. in 1859:
Determined... to assist to [sic] the accomplishment of my anxiously cherished desire
for the evangelization of the Deccan — that is the distinct publication of the Gospel
throughout it - I have resolved to invest money in the extension lines of the Great Indian
Peninsula Railway Comp. knowing that the railway is the great means of spreading
news, and so this the best of all news the glad tidings of the Gospel. At the same time
I have in view the developement [sic] of the resources of India as they concern especially
the production of cotton, so as to counteract American Slavery. The Railway once
extensively existing all over India, people will, I anticipate confidently, travel into the
parts adjoining those to which it facilitates the entrance, and tracts Gospels etc. will
be more widely and largely distributed and disseminated.108
The evangelical presecription for India's regeneration was thus essentially
the same as Livingstone's prescription for the Zambezi - commerce and
Christianity. The prerequisites of economic development in India were
improvements in transport and public works. In both spheres commmercial
aspirations and missionary strategy coincided. The Godaveri navigation
scheme in central India was undertaken under pressure from the Lancashire
cotton community in order to facilitate the export of cotton.107 The two officers
primarily responsible for the engineering works - Colonel (later General Sir)
Arthur Cotton and Captain F. T. Haig - were both fervent evangelicals and
102
L.M.S. annual reports for 1858-9, p. liv, for 1859—60, p. lv. Donors to the L.M.S. special
fund for Indian extension included Sir Elkanah and William Armitage; John Cheetham, M.P.;
Sir James Watts and S. Watts, Esq.; J. Dilworth, Esq.; and J. and S. Rigby.
103
H a r n e t t y , Imperialism and free trade, p . 7 9 ; L. H . J e n k s , The migration of British capital to 1875
(London, 1927), p . 219.
104
W . J . MacPherson, ' I n v e s t m e n t in Indian railways, 1845-1875', Economic History Review,
2nd ser., v m , 2 (1955), 181; cited in H a r n e t t y , Imperialism and free trade, p . 79.
105
See Church Missionary Intelligencer, x u , 11 (1861), 247, 2 5 6 - 7 ; XHI, 7 (1862), 159.
10
* Arthington to Prout, 12 J a n . 1859, L . M . S . h o m e office incoming letters, C . W . M . A . For
Arthington see A. M. Chirgwin, Arthington's million: the romance of the Arthington trust (London, n.d.).
It is worthy of note that Livingstone and Arthington corresponded in 1865; see Clendennen and
Cunningham (eds.), David Livingstone, p. 91.
107
Harnetty, Imperialism and free trade, pp. 69-70.
' COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY '
89
missionary enthusiasts. Both conceived of the potential benefits of the project
in the broadest possible terms. Cotton believed the scheme to be 'the best
opening yet discovered' for supplying Manchester's demand for cheap cotton
and creating a market for ' vast quantities' of English manufactures. Cheap
Godaveri cotton would undercut American slave-grown cotton and thus
promote eventual abolition.108 The 'redemption' 108 of the Godaveri district
was to be accomplished by a blend of physical and spiritual improvement:
'Two things', said Cotton, 'are wanted, to make this country a garden: the
natural water and the water of life. u l ° Haig was more explicit still in his hopes
that the Godaveri navigation would be a highway for the gospel as well as for
commerce: it promised a means of attack upon 'the uncultivated waste of
Hydrabad heathenism' which surrounded the upper reaches of the river.111
In the short term, the large labour force employed on the works presented
strategic opportunities for evangelism; the head Indian superintendent of
works at Dummagudem professed conversion in i860 as a result of Haig's
personal evangelistic activities.112 Prospects such as these had moved Arthur
Cotton in 1859 to appeal, through Haig, to the C.M.S. home committee for
the establishment of a C.M.S. station on the upper Godaveri.113 The special
India fund set up in response to the Mutiny enabled the C.M.S. to accede to
the appeal, and the first missonary arrived on the Godaveri in 1861. Lack of
finance and constructional difficulties dogged the navigation scheme until it
was finally abandoned in 1871,114 but evangelicals could reflect, as did Haig's
wife in his biography, that' in God's providence the engineering work had been
used to pave the way for His own blessed work of gathering the heathen into
the Kingdom of Christ'. 115
Many Christian observers thus yoked together commerce and Christianity
in their remedies for India's malaise. Some hoped that the two might also be
brought together in such a way as to increase the level of domestic support
for foreign missions. Probably the majority of Lancashire manufacturers were
interested in India less as a source of raw material than as a market.118 The
rising Indian demand for cotton fabrics in 1858—9 brought a new era of
108
A r t h u r Cotton, Public works in India, their importance; with suggestions for their extension and
improvement (2nd edn, London, 1854), pp. 81-2, 95-6, 100-1; see also, for Cotton's estimate of the
missionary prospects and significance of the Godaveri, Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society
for 1859-60, pp. 158-60, and Church Missionary Intelligencer, xi, 7 (i860), 151-3.
108
See Lady [Elizabeth Reid] Hope, General Sir Arthur Cotton, R.E. K.C.S.I., his life and work
(London, 1900), p. 70.
110
Stock, History of the C.M.S., m, 191.
111
South India mission book, vol. xxvu, 1860-2 (CI2/M27), pp. 206-11, C.M.S.A.
118
Stock, History of the C.M.S., 111, 191 -2.
113
Proceedings of the C.M.S. for 1859-60, p. 158; South India mission book, vol. xxvn 1860-2
(CI2/M27), p. 206, C.M.S.A.
114
Harnetty, Imperialism and free trade, pp. 73-7.
111
[C.A.JHaig, Memories of the life of General F. T. Haig by his wife (London, 1902), p. 29; cited
in Harnetty, Imperialism and free trade, p. 7on.
111
A. Redford and B. Clapp, Manchester merchants and foreign trade vol. II: 1850-1939
(Manchester, 1956), p. 22; Silver, Manchester men, p. 158; but cf. Farnie, English cotton industry,
p. 87.
9O
BRIAN STANLEY
profitability and expansion to the Lancashire cotton industry.117 On these
grounds two letters to the L.M.S. in November 1859 from a Preston congregationalist, Thomas Simpson, urged the society to make a special appeal to
cotton manufacturers, spinners and merchants in the India trade to plough
back some of their Indian profits into Indian missions.118 Simpson made
particular reference to James Kershaw, Liberal M.P. for Stockport; although
Kershaw's commercial interests were not directly identified with the Indian
market, he had, according to Simpson, benefited handsomely from the domestic
market being swept of stock as a result of manufacturers changing to Indian
cloths.119 There is no evidence that the L.M.S. adopted Simpson's suggestion.
Although subscription lists do suggest that some leading representatives of the
cotton interest supported the L.M.S. special fund for Indian extension,120 the
society seems to have been unconvinced that the cotton interest could be
brought to see the nature of their obligation to India with the same logical
clarity as Simpson. Nevertheless, Simpson was not alone in believing that the
cotton trade had created a predisposition in Lancashire to support Indian
missions which the missionary societies ought to exploit to their advantage. The
Wesleyan Methodists received a similar letter in May i860 from Thomas
Taylor, a Liverpool resident, urging that the time was ripe for a specific appeal
to Manchester cotton manufacturers and Liverpool cotton dealers on behalf
of their society's new guarantee fund; Taylor, however, believed that it was
the question of cotton supply rather than the search for new markets which
had disposed the commercial community to look favourably on the missionary
movement.121
VI
The impact first of David Livingstone and then of the Indian Mutiny had
brought about a substantial convergence between commercial and Christian
expectations. The convergence was brought still nearer completion by news
from China. The preoccupation of public opinion with India during the
Mutiny had eclipsed the revival of missionary expectations for China which
followed the outbreak of the second Anglo-Chinese war. But the autumn of
1858 brought news of the treaty of Tientsin, which gave European travellers
virtually unlimited access to the Chinese interior, and guaranteed security to
Christian converts. The spirit of 1843 was revived in all its intensity.122 China
was at last fully open to Christian missions. John Angell James published an
117
J . R. T . Hughes, Fluctuations in trade, industry and finance: a study of British economic development,
1850-1860 (Oxford, i960), p. 96.
118
Simpson to Prout, 12 and 18 Nov. 1859, L.M.S. home office incoming letters, C.W.M.A.
" • Simpson to Prout, 18 Nov. 1859, L.M.S. home office incoming letters, C.W.M.A.
Kershaw was a regular and generous contributor to L.M.S. funds.
120
See n. 102 above.
121
Taylor to Hoole, 2 May i860, W.M.M.S. home letters, M.M.S.A.
182
See Evangelical Magazine, new ser., xxxvi (1858), 617, new ser., 1 (1859), 185-8; Baptist
Magazine, u (1859), 333-5, 377-8.
' COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY '
gi
immensely successful pamphlet urging that 'God's voice from China to the
British churches' was now unmistakable: once again God had overruled an
undeniably unjust war to promote his own purposes of salvation.123 James
feared that the religious public might be too preoccupied with India to spare
much for China,124 but he reckoned without the peculiar brand of eschatological
excitement which China was able to inspire. Manchester manufacturers, in
1856-8 as in 1839-42, entertained expectations of the China trade which Dr
Gatrell describes as 'quite millenarial'.125 The epithet is appropriate, for many
missionary supporters believed that the conversion of China was destined to
usher in the millennium of world-wide gospel triumph. ' The conversion of
China', wrote James,' will form the most stupendous revolution that can occur
in the history of the world'; China, for so long ' a desolate heritage', was about
to be transformed into ' the garden of the Lord' and for a thousand years would
constitute 'the brightest beauty of millenial glory'.126 Inspired by what one
historian has described as a 'celestial domino theory', Christians anticipated
that the conversion of China's three hundred millions would precipitate the
collapse of Satan's defences throughout the globe.127 Animated by this vision,
some of the missionary societies launched renewed special efforts for China.128
That free traders should view the commercial prospects created by the opening
of China with such eschatological enthusiasm becomes more intelligible in the
light of this background of theological expectation.129 Palmerstonian interventionism had been the instrument of the divine hand to break down the walls
of the mightiest of Satan's citadels so that missionary and trader together might
inaugurate the millennial age of gospel triumph and human brotherhood. The
'Christian imperialism of free rade' had reached its high-water-mark.
China's importance as a market for cotton goods did increase significantly
after 1858.130 But the realities of open access to China never matched the
grandiose scale of commercial and missionary expectations: missionary progress
proved painfully slow. In the course of the 1860s the alliance between commerce and Christianity gradually fell apart. The post-Mutiny cotton boom
123
James, God's voice from China, pp. 481-3.
James to Prout, n.d. [1858], L.M.S. home office incoming letters, box n , C.W.M.A.
125
Gatrell, 'The commercial middle class', p. 454.
12<
James, God's voice from China, pp. 495, 553.
127
S. C. Miller, 'Ends and means: missionary justification of force in nineteenth century
China', in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The missionary enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Mass.
'974). PP- 280-1.
128
Evangelical Magazine, newser., 1 (1859), 253-71; Baptist Magazine, Li (1859), 377, 527-8; but
cf. Proceedings of the C.M.S. for 1859-60, 177.
ui
For the view that millennial expectations were an important stimulus to a wide variety of
mid-nineteenth century reforming and free trading movements see Alexander Tyrrell, ' Making
the millennium: the mid-nineteenth century peace movement', Historical Journal, xxi, 1 (1978),
75~95- T n e 'millennial' views held by the majority of early Victorian evangelicals were of a
'post-millennial' kind (i.e. the millennium is to be introduced by human agency and precedes
the return of Christ). They were thus susceptible of a loose and secularized interpretation which
reduced the expectation of the ' millennium' to nothing more than a coming age of universal
goodwill and brotherhood.
130
Farnie, English cotton industry, p. 121.
124
92
BRIAN STANLEY
initiated a crisis of over-production which was the real cause of the
Lancashire depression of the 1860s.131 The crisis of the 1860s, writes Farnie,
' dethroned cotton from its pride of place in the national economy and shattered
its hypnotic hold on the national imagination'. 132 After the American Civil
War, Lancashire manufacturers reverted with easier consciences to their
reliance on American cotton. The price of raw cotton fell steadily from 1866,
and Lancashire no longer needed to look to the missjon field for its cotton
supplies. In India the development programmes that Manchester had for so
long advocated were now under way.133 The free traders had secured their
principal imperial objectives. Imperial discussion now focused on the white
colonies. As secular attention was withdrawn from the major fields of British
missionary involvement, missionary interest was thrown wholly on to the innate
resources of enthusiasm within the churches. The cotton famine brought the
period of consistently high missionary giving to an end in 1862.134 The societies
began to complain of declining interest and a renewed lack of candidates.135
At the same time, Christian confidence in the redemptive function of commerce
was waning. The disastrous outcome of the Mackenzie expedition led the
Universities' Mission to Central Africa to abandon its original commitment
to a Livingstonian policy of'commerce and Christianity' in central Africa.13*
The gospel o f commerce and Christianity' was not dead - as late as 191 o some
missionary organs were endorsing the opinion of colonial spokesmen that
Nigerian cotton might be the means of Lancashire's economic salvation137 - but
a growing body of Christian opinion in late Victorian Britain repudiated the
contaminating association with commerce, and conceived of the missionary
task in terms of evangelism pure and simple.138
131
Ibid. pp. 138-45.
132 Ibid. p. 167.
Silver, Manchester men, p p . 2 4 2 - 3 , 2 9 0 - 1 .
134
For a fuller discussion of the effect of the cotton famine on missionary giving see my 'Home
support for overseas missions', pp. 56-8.
l3s
See Baptist Magazine, LVII (1865), 671; Stock, History of the C.M.S., 11, 337, 357. The B.M.S.
annual report for 1865-6 referred to a notion which had 'somehow extensively prevailed that the
interest taken by the churches in the Mission has declined, and, consequently, their contributions
have declined too'. The report believed this impression to be mistaken, but the prevalence of the
impression must itself be significant (Baptist Magazine, LVIH (1866), 327-8).
136
Neave, 'History of the U.M.C.A.', p. 135.
137
J . H . Boer, Missionary messengers of liberation in a colonial context: a case study of the Sudan United
Mission (Amsterdam, 1979), p. 175.
138
See Andrew Porter,' Evangelical enthusiasm, missionary motivation and West Africa in the
late nineteenth century: the career of G. W. Brooke', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
vi, 1 (1977), 23-46; A. F. Walls, 'Black Europeans, white Africans: some missionary motives in
133
West Africa', in D . Baker (ed.), Religious motivation: biographical and sociological problems for the church
historian (Studies in Church History, vol. 15, Oxford, 1978), pp. 339-48. The case of the Sudan United
Mission, however, suggests that Livingstonian attitudes to commerce remained more influential
in late nineteenth-century evangelical missions than Porter and Walls imply; see Boer, Missionary
messengers, pp. 99-105.
£
' C O M M E R C E AND C H R I S T I A N I T Y '
93
VII
In conclusion, we may return to the two questions posed at the beginning of
this article. The facility with which early Victorian Christians coupled together
commerce and Christianity is explicable, it has been argued, primarily in terms
of the providentialism which dominated nineteenth-century evangelical
thought. Christian certainty in the universality of the divine purpose to
propagate Christianity invested overseas trade, as the principal means of
contact between Christian and non-Christian peoples, with evangelical and
even eschatological significance.l39 This' pure' faith in commerce was, however,
qualified by the recognition that Western influence without the saving grace
of a missionary presence was a perilous policy. The less ambiguous aspect of
the ' commerce and Christianity' creed was the assumption derived from the
moral philosophy of the providentialist tradition of a natural harmony in the
divine order: spiritual benevolence by nations could be expected to reap
tangible rewards in this world; where commerce and Christianity were held
in their true reciprocal relation, all parties would be benefited by the
out-working of the providential purpose.
It has been argued, secondly, that the existing providentialist inclination to
regard commercial development as an integral feature of the divine strategy
for the redemption of the heathen world achieved its most complete and
pervasive consummation between 1857 and i860. The most significant
contributor to this convergence between missionary and free trading expectations was the remorseless logic of the evangelical response to the Indian
Mutiny. The peak of early Victorian missionary enthusiasm thus coincided
with the heyday of the 'imperialism of free trade'. However, whilst missionary
supporters appear, with few exceptions, to have given theological sanction
to the expansionist concerns of free traders, it is less clear that merchants and
manufacturers allowed the ideological conjunction between commerce and
Christianity to dictate their own trading and investment policies. The
mercantile response to Livingstone's propaganda in 1857 appears to have been
enthusiastic in theory but minimal in practice. Samuel Wilberforce's repetition
of the same arguments on behalf of the new Central Africa Mission in 1860
may have been rather more fruitful. The indications are that the missionary
societies' appeals for Indian extension in the aftermath of the Mutiny did
receive support from sections of the Lancashire cotton interest, but the evidence
is necessarily ambiguous and difficult to interpret.140 In point of fact, of course,
the range of free trading interests was always more diverse and complex than
«
u
* See Farnie, English cotton industry, pp. 87-8; Tyrrell, 'Making the millennium', pp. 82-3,
89-91.
140
It would appear from the L.M.S. annual reports, for example, that the donations to the
special India fund in 1858-60 from cotton magnates such as Sir Elkanah Armitage and Sir James
Watts were not matched by ordinary donations to the L.M.S. in the neighbouring years. However,
both Armitage and Watts were congregationalists, and therefore likely to support the L.M.S. in
any case. It was quite possible for individuals to contribute in various ways to a missionary society
without their names appearing in a subscription list.
94
BRIAN STANLEY
the mechanistic logic of the 'commerce and Christianity' school implied. The
impression remains that the missionary lobby was more prepared to baptize
the 'secular' concerns of free traders with the sanctifying influence of divine
purpose than were commercial interests to promote missionary expansion with
a view to trading benefit. Any assumption of an automatic and universal
alliance between missionary and commercial expansion from nineteenthcentury Britain is contradicted by the almost total refusal of British missions
to show any interest in Latin America, a continent which absorbed a far higher
proportion of British overseas investment than Africa or even India.141 The
convergence between the missionary movement and the imperialism of free
trade may, therefore, prove to have been more rhetorical than actual.
Nevertheless, the enduring significance of the rhetoric cannot be lightly
dismissed. For the years 1857-60 were crucial in the process whereby the
evangelical understanding of empire in terms of providence, natural law, and
trusteeship became the established framework of British imperial thinking, a
framework that was to persist long after the providentialist theology which was
its foundation had disintegrated.142
141
142
Gf. D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and empire 1830-^14 (London, 1973), pp- 54~5Cf. Stokes, English Utilitarians, p p . 30&-8.
i