EXPLORERS, MISSIONARIES, TRADERS

Steven S. Maughan

European trade, cultural contact, and colonization, following the geographical discoveries and maritime innovations of the fifteenth century, profoundly altered non-European societies throughout the world. European exploration was inevitably followed by penetration of markets by traders and the establishment of Christian missions, if not always by formal imperial control and colonization. Aggressive venturers, seeking personal, national, and religious advantage, were at the forefront of new encounters with non-European peoples. Explorers, traders, and missionaries were thus crucial to the construction of European systems of commercial and cultural exchange as they negotiated and interpreted European contacts with other world cultures. From the sixteenth century Europeans engaged the world in increasing numbers, motivated by variously mixed ambitions for wealth, fame, honor, and the advancement of Christian spirituality, authority, and philanthropy. European society was itself significantly altered by these material and cultural exchanges as it acted in every region of the world as an aggressive force for the transformation of economies and societies.

Exploration, trade, and proselytizing often shaded into each other, and were frequently entangled with the use of military force and the establishment of colonial rule. Traders carried European technologies of warfare and production as well as goods, while missionaries often advocated European social organization and education as well as religious beliefs. All had the power to profoundly alter traditional patterns of non-European society. In Europe itself, new wealth generated through seaborne trade contributed to increasing urban cosmopolitanism, while access to colonial markets significantly shifted patterns of consumption. Visions of the world abroad, filtered through Christian belief, supported assumptions of European spiritual and cultural ascendancy that were eroded only in the twentieth-century era of decolonization.

However, explorers, traders, settlers, soldiers, and government officials often came in conflict with missionaries over European "vices" and the mistreatment of non-Europeans. Additionally, competition from the mid-sixteenth century between Roman Catholics and Protestants, as well as between traders and other agents of emerging European nation-states, generated considerable friction between Europeans of differing national and religious identities. Thus the history of European trading and proselytizing in the world since the Renaissance has been characterized by complex and rapidly changing patterns of coercion, resistance, opportunism, collaboration, cooperation, and competition between many European and non-European groups.

Both trading and missionary activity are inherently transcultural with objectives that are advanced by an understanding of, if not always an empathy with, their target societies. Militant belief in the universal import of their religious message drove missionaries to surprisingly persistent activity in the midst of foreign, and often hostile, cultures. Missionaries frequently operated at the forefront of the production of knowledge for and about foreign societies as influential educators, social reformers, language scholars, and medical providers. While missionaries often sought to strip their message of salvation from European cultural trappings, just as traders often adopted the guise of the cultures in which they operated, both nevertheless carried the ideological, political, and social baggage of their particular cultures.

THE "FIRST" EUROPEAN IMPERIAL AGE: THE IBERIAN POWERS AND THEIR EMULATORS

European overseas expansion grew out of fifteenth-century Iberian crown-sponsored expeditions of discovery designed to open ocean trading routes to Africa and the East. In the "first" age of European expansion, spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese and Spanish were the pioneers, although they were effectively challenged within a century by the Dutch, English, and French. Portuguese (and later Dutch) commercial domination of the Indian Ocean trading economy, and Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English exploitation of resources and colonization in the "New World" of the western hemisphere were the hallmarks of this era. Iberian exploration shattered the cultural isolation that characterized past ages by inaugurating an intercontinental world trading economy.

The growth of European overseas trading was dependent upon earlier European developments: with the late-medieval emergence of a cash economy based on expanding internal trade, the growth of cities and population, and the emergence of an aggressive class of investors increasingly experienced in organizing trading ventures, the social and financial resources to support commercial ambition were in place. Additionally, continuing conflict with Islam—expressed from the eleventh century in crusading in the Holy Land and on other frontiers—when combined with the emergence of popular mendicant religious orders committed to Christian education and evangelism, most notably the Franciscans and Dominicans—produced both strong military and moral stimuli to Christian expansion. Thus, when in the fifteenth century waning Mongol rule in central Asia and waxing Ottoman power in the eastern Mediterranean disrupted trade routes carrying eastern luxury goods and spices, Europeans had both the incentives and means to seek new lines of commerce.

The relative poverty and peripheral location of Europe limited knowledge of Asia and Africa to the geographies of the ancients, notably Ptolemy (c. 100 c.e.), and the travelers' accounts of moderns, notably the Venetian trader Marco Polo (1254–1324). Many reports of the East, including those of missionary embassies sent by the papacy to China and India from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, provided glimpses of lands containing gold, silks, and spices, and reputed to hold mysterious realms, such as the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John.

Early exploration. Iberian exploration vastly enlarged this knowledge. Iberians, utilizing their advantageous geographical position on the Atlantic seaboard, sought to circumvent Mediterranean commerce dominated by Italians and Arabs by employing the martial skills of a crusading aristocracy and gentry seasoned in the conquest of Iberia from Moorish Muslims while drawing on the experience of both local and Italian (particularly Genoese) seamen and pilots.

The Portuguese and Spanish crowns, confident in their possession of the true religion, received papal sanction to establish monopolies in overseas trade and missions, and promoted ecclesiastical expansion as official state ideology. By the sixteenth century, Portuguese trading networks and Spanish territorial conquests provided poorly connected men, often from the tough, ambitious lower gentry, opportunities to escape the limitations of hierarchy and poverty. Increasingly independent private traders grew rich. Missionary orders—including by the mid-1500s the newly founded Jesuits, who operated as specialists in expansion as part of a larger commitment to oppose the "heresies" of northern European Protestantism—offered overseas challenges to the piously devoted. The Portuguese and early Spanish empires absorbed thousands of men, and in both, partially because Iberian society included substantial numbers of female slaves, miscegenation was common. These practices resulted in large mixed-blood communities, from which new generations of powerful local traders and ambitious priests were drawn.

From the 1420s the Portuguese royal dynasty systematically supported exploration of the western African coast, encouraging innovations in ship design and navigation to support the search for Christian allies, slaves, gold, and spices. A large Portuguese seafaring population and an Atlantic seaboard commercial class that included many aristocratic shipowners aided exploration that by the early 1500s revealed a rich network of ancient seaborne trade lanes in the Indian Ocean. Through piracy, interdiction, and licensing of existing trades, control of the critical Spice Islands (Indonesia and Sri Lanka), and seizure of most of the important trading entrepôts from Arabia to India, the Portuguese crown and its trading servants wrested control of the seas from ubiquitous Arab and Asian traders. These latter were too ethnically, religiously, and regionally diverse to effectively oppose a heavily armed and single-minded opponent. Dynastic rivalry also led the Spanish crown to sanction exploration to open an eastern trade; its servants arrived in the Caribbean in the 1490s to discover a continent and a range of societies, from simple and nomadic to sophisticated and urban, hitherto unknown in any records available to Europeans. Portuguese and Spanish explorers were essentially predatory, seizing what trade and territory they could. That lightly populated Portugal encountered sophisticated, militarily powerful, and populous Asian societies where Europeans suffered high mortality from endemic fevers meant that, after limited initial conquests, the crown focused on creating a trading monopoly in spices (pepper, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and others), drugs, and dyes for the European market. That more heavily populated Spain, recently unified as a kingdom and just entering a period of European imperial ascendancy, encountered societies lacking military technology based on iron and the horse and resistance to European epidemic disease meant Spanish rule in the New World was characterized by widespread territorial conquest and Christianization.

Trade drove the Portuguese empire: royal officials and trading agents dominated a system theoretically controlled from Lisbon, but in which government agents, sailors, ex-soldiers, priests, and even proscribed foreign traders like Spanish-speaking Jews (expelled from Spain in 1492) enriched themselves through private trade in Asian textiles, porcelain, gems, and bulk commodities. Europeans profitably inserted themselves into preexisting Asian trading networks, expanding trade from fortified trading enclaves known as factories and aiding the rapid diffusion of European knowledge and technology in gunnery, shipbuilding, astronomy, and navigation.

The impact of early encounters: populations, material goods, and trade. Where the Portuguese seized territory, as at Goa, they created Christian communities of Europeans, indigenous people, and their Eurasian offspring from which an aggressive, independent, and increasingly indigenized class of traders developed. Similar racial mixing occurred in Portuguese Brazil (discovered in 1500 and developed as Portugal's only major settlement colony) where extensive slave holding and contact with Amerindians produced large multiracial populations of mulattos and mestiços that grew into an officially Portuguese, yet multiethnic, polyglot civilization, from which farmers, clerks, and traders were drawn. In a more rigidly controlled Spanish empire, where administration and extensive landholding was vigorously reserved for those of European blood, large mestizo populations were relegated to poverty and living off of Amerindians, many adopting trade as the best route to social advancement.

The shape of the Spanish empire largely resulted from the profound and extensive consequences of the "Columbian exchange" between the old and new worlds of previously separated diseases, plants, and animals. When amplified in effect by relentless Spanish warfare and brutal forced labor, Old World diseases (smallpox, measles, and influenza among others) devastated Amerindian populations, which declined from perhaps 80 to 8 million within a century of European contact. Throughout the western hemisphere, those who would resist European aggression were depopulated and demoralized while European assumptions of the superiority of European culture, religion, and socioeconomic models were reinforced.

Old World animals (horses, cattle, pigs, sheep) revolutionized American food production by introducing carting and heavy plowing, widespread herding and ranching, and equestrian mobility to nomadic frontier cultures. Old World plants (sugar, coffee, wheat, barley, and others) provided export commodities, often produced on Mediterranean-patterned slave plantations, and food crops able to sustain European settlement. New World crops like tobacco, chocolate, and dyes made from brazilwood and cochineal, could also be effectively developed for trade to Europe, but of greater impact was the introduction of New World food crops like potatoes, beans, and maize, which had a powerful, stimulating effect on European population growth, especially among the lower social classes. New World wealth, in the form of thousands of tons of looted and mined gold and silver, flowed to Europe, fueling economic growth (and inflation) already underway in Europe as Spain, resource poor and lacking manufacturing capacity, spent freely on essential supplies in northern European ports. Similarly, as trade to Asia grew, gold and silver flowed eastward, accelerating the use of currency, and the pace of commercial activity, thus creating new, mostly urban, centers of power in Asian societies.

In the New World, as early exploration quickly gave way to plunder, warfare, and the seizure of indigenous peoples as slaves and peons—processes that overtook the Aztec, Maya, and Inca empires—a trading economy grew fueled by emerging European markets for New World agricultural goods. Crucial to this emerging order, rationalized, export-oriented agriculture, especially of sugar cane, spread rapidly throughout the Caribbean. Worked increasingly by African slaves, the sugar economy stimulated a transatlantic trade that transformed European habits and nutrition while enriching Atlantic seaboard ports and their merchant elites. With traders working furiously throughout the Iberian empires to supply products demanded by colonial settlements and the populations that surrounded them with household goods, food, wines, luxury items, and slaves, the range and volume of European trade expanded as never before.

This trade began to shift the centuries-old center of European economic weight from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, as northern European port cities rose to economic preeminence. And with demand for sugar came a parallel demand for slaves, largely supplied by Portuguese slave traders, operating out of Guinea and Angola under crown-licensed contractors and subcontracting independent traders. Here alliances with African tribes and an emerging Afro-Portuguese community that took grain, cloth, beads, iron goods, and horses in exchange for slaves supplied a market that grew rapidly after 1550, inaugurating the forced migration, over three and a half centuries, of approximately 10 million African slaves, mostly male, to the Americas.

Missionaries and their impact in the East. Missions spread rapidly along the routes of Iberian trade and conquest, as priests and friars frequently accompanied exploration and trading voyages. The nature of missionary practice was strongly determined by its relationship to colonial power, with coercive methods employed more frequently in areas of strong political control. In the East centers like Goa, Macao, and Nagasaki rose rapidly as missionary as well as trading hubs, but only in strongly controlled port enclaves like Goa could religion and governance be melded in crusading style through forced conversions.

Outside these enclaves missionaries in the eastern empires—many recruited from urban and cosmopolitan Italy as well as Portugal—adopted accommodationist strategies; notably, Jesuit missionaries embraced indigenous dress and customs, allowed converts local rituals, and developed indigenized Christian rites and sympathetic responses to eastern religious beliefs. In China Jesuits were able to exchange knowledge in western science at the imperial court for the opportunity to convert, by the seventeenth century, approximately thirty thousand followers; in southern India missions more successfully drew perhaps a quarter million converts, many from lower castes seeking Portuguese protection; and even more spectacularly in Japan, some 300,000 were converted in a period of internal Japanese turmoil.

Many converts appear to have been attracted by the ethical content of Christianity; however, inducements to conversion, including commercial favoritism and bribery, and extensive missionary trading generated vigorous criticism among priests and friars of different nationalities and orders, as well as from Asian elites. State persecutions in China and Japan largely extinguished missionary influence in these regions by the eighteenth century. Despite the problems of penetrating eastern societies, however, Catholic missions secured as many as a million converts (from populations of tens of millions) in the lands surrounding the Indian Ocean, many linked to trading communities associated with Eurasians and the Portuguese. In the process of contact, excellent, detailed missionary reports of China, Japan, the Pacific, and other areas (including pioneering studies of eastern languages like Chinese and Vietnamese) generated a much greater knowledge of the East.

Spanish missions in the Americas. Spanish missions faced similar problems in the Americas: in frontier regions accommodationist measures were attempted, while in heavily settled areas, coercion and social advantages to conversion aided missions. The Spanish secular church was rapidly swept up in trade and exploitation of the Americas, sharing the contempt and impatience with unfamiliar foreign cultures of Spanish colonists intent on re-creating an essentially feudal social hierarchy of noble landowning rulers commanding dependent agricultural laborers. Expectations of social hierarchy, including widespread acceptance of slavery for black Africans, also characterized the ideas of most missionaries, who were recruited from a culturally confident Spanish population.

Nevertheless, it was primarily missionaries who condemned the brutal results of the virtual enslavement of Amerindians and, however imperfectly, cooperated with the Crown (which was interested in ordering colonial society) to protect them. Often finding themselves at odds with settler communities that habitually defied royal authority to violently conscript indigenous labor, missionary policy developed, as in Mexico, for example, on the logic of separating Amerindians into town communities, where protective mission institutions (church, school, orphanage, hospital), prohibitions on European contact, and Christianization were mixed with attempts to re-create traditional agricultural and artisanal self-sufficiency. In mission compounds, proselytes were taught Christianity and Latin, and often compelled to adopt European customs such as domestic architecture and manners, western dress, and monogamy.

Missionary reservations were the most developed form of this latter policy. The first was established by the Franciscans in Guatemala in the 1540s, and later Jesuits favored this strategy, most famously applied in the nearly autonomous Jesuit state that arose in Paraguay. In one Asian Pacific area, the Philippines, Spanish colonization (following territorial claims made in 1521 by the explorer Magellan in his circumnavigation of the globe) also led to widespread conversions. In hostile and economically unproductive regions, however, like California and many rugged inland South American areas, while mission communities were established with a zeal that produced martyrs, few conversions resulted owing to the absence of widespread Spanish social power.

As culturally aggressive institutions allied to state power, Spanish missions offered social structure and economic opportunity in return for at least the outward forms of Christian practice. The ritual of Catholic worship was often readily syncretized with previous beliefs, especially in the Aztec and Incan lands where subject populations already accustomed to paternalistic priestly religion and inured to docile agricultural toil came rapidly under control of the Church. Because missions baptized freely and parishes were often enormous in their extent, missionaries in reality contributed to the creation of a set of local cultures that were wide-ranging amalgams of Christianity and the cultural forms—music, dance, and iconography—of ancient religions.

European religious zeal produced a population of around 5,500 missionaries in the Americas by 1600, nearly 75 percent of them Franciscans and Dominicans. Early idealism faded as missions became routinized and adopted European monastic practices, including heavy involvement in trade and the management of indigenous labor (especially in agriculture and textiles). Widespread criticism of apparent greed resulted as missionary trading extended to virtually every form of colonial product and missions acquired enormous land holdings. The Church and its missions also succumbed to the growing racial consciousness of colonial society, ordaining few indigenous bishops (and none at all in its first century), and increasingly denying European education to converts. Thus, while missionaries could be important preservers of indigenous languages and certain cultural forms, the effective spread of Roman Catholicism and Spanish and Portuguese as dominant languages must be considered the single greatest unifying influence in the creation of cultural identities throughout Latin America.

Spanish and Portuguese experience in the New World and the East commanded educated attention throughout Europe. The accounts of explorers, traders, travelers, and missionaries—Columbus, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Amerigo Vespucci, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Matteo Ricci, Jean de Léry, and others—were repeatedly published throughout Europe and stirred wonder at lands and peoples unknown to the ancients and productive of abundant wealth. With rare exceptions, Europeans, with their technological power in ships, warfare, and writing, strongly expressed their sense of superiority

BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS

Spanish missionaries in the New World faced the enormous challenge of converting entirely unknown cultures of people that had been immediately and brutally exploited by conquistadors for tribute and labor. The most famous and influential of the early Spanish churchmen and missionaries advocating more enlightened treatment of the Amerindians was Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566).

Born in Seville to a minor merchant family, Las Casas sailed to Hispaniola in 1502, and as a conquistador participated in numerous expeditions, for which he was granted an encomienda (a royal grant of land and Indian laborers). Following the colonial pattern, Las Casas established a large estate, worked many of his Indian serfs in local mines, and participated (as a priest, having been ordained in 1512) in the bloody subjugation of Cuba, for which he received additional encomienda. Evangelistic work among "his" Indians led to a radical change in his outlook; relinquishing his encomienda, he became a champion of the rights of Amerindians and leader of a small but vocal group of churchmen crusading for the general improvement of Indian conditions.

When he returned to Spain, Las Casas advocated the natural rights of Amerindians in the Barcelona Parliament and received royal support for a utopian plan to build towns where free Indians and carefully selected Spanish farmers would create harmonious mixed Christian communities. The failure of a model South American settlement in 1522, in the face of opposition from encomenderos and violent resistance from local indigenous inhabitants, led Las Casas to join the Dominican order and begin writing the first of several historical and prophetic exposés on the oppression and injustice of Spanish colonialism. He also expressed the growing uncertainty in church and government circles concerning the enormous human costs of Spanish colonization, yet royal attempts to regulate abuses largely failed in the face of fierce resistance from encomenderos in the distant, expansive empire. The weight of reforming opinion led the papacy in 1537 to declare all humans deserving of freedom, property, and true religion. A successful peaceful mission led by Las Casas and several Dominicans in the still-unconquered region of Tuzutlan (in present-day Costa Rica) induced Las Casas to again return to Spain in 1540 to condemn worldly lust for wealth as an indefensible basis for Spanish expansion.

Rejecting the views of contemporaries that all native Americans were "naturally lazy and vicious, melancholic, cowardly, and in general a lying shiftless people," Las Casas instead characterized Amerindians as "a simple people without evil and without guile . . . most submissive, patient, peaceful and virtuous," lacking only true religion. His arguments induced the Spanish crown in 1542 to pass the New Laws, outlawing the encomienda system, yet when Las Casas returned to the Americas as bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala, his uncompromising application of these laws and the attempt to again create model mission villages brought widespread and violent Spanish resistance, including that of governing officials and his brother bishops.

Armed attacks forced Las Casas to return to Spain in 1547 where as an influential courtier he sought to defeat popular Aristotelian arguments that Amerindians were naturally inferior and thus could be justly conquered and enslaved. Arguing from classical texts that Indians, as rational and charitable peoples, did not fit the category of slaves "by nature," he characterized Spaniards as the true barbarians in the colonial encounter. Nevertheless, the practice of slavery continued in Spanish America, although waning slowly over the eighteenth century. The wide publication of Las Casas' works in translation throughout Europe, however, brought him to notice in northern nations where his view that the Spaniards brought destruction, not salvation, and that their methods of colonization were fundamentally unjust armed Protestant propagandists to justify aggressive opposition to Spanish control in the New World.

and a confidence that their religious truths and established social hierarchies should and would be universally adopted. The wonderful strangeness of the New World in particular led first generations of observers to fall back on traditional allusions, envisioning the Americas as an Arcadia or Eden, abounding in simplicity, innocence, and abundance. Strongly influenced by millenarianism and Erasmian humanism, many mystical Catholic friars believed an evangelized America could answer the moral corruptions of Europe. However, because Catholic missions were carried out as state policy by specialized orders, missionary perspectives had little popular resonance or impact among the laity and clergy of Europe.

The first northern European encounters: the logic of trade. Iberian overseas successes drew north Atlantic nations into maritime exploration. Failing the discovery of northern passages to the East or lands of abundant gold, northern Europeans, including Swedes and Danes but dominated by the Dutch, English, and French, engaged first in parasitic activities against Iberian trade. Early smuggling and privateering, however, quickly gave way to competitive trade, settlement, and agricultural production. Religious passions arising from the conflicts of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of mercantilist economic attitudes, with their stress on acquiring bullion and enhancing exports, led to new exploration, trading ventures, and settlement. The French, for example, after widespread privateering against Iberians (often launched from Protestant Huguenot Atlantic ports) established backwoods traders at widely dispersed trading posts reaching into the North American Great Lakes region. From these they established contacts with the fiercely independent North American Indian tribes to exchange blankets, brandy, steel weapons, and other manufactured goods for beaver and otter skins for the European luxury market. As traders from other nations entered the field, the growing trade and availability of weapons led to increased indigenous warfare, making missionary work treacherous. Following the pattern of Catholic Iberian powers, French Canada was dominated by a monopolistic church that in 1636 gave the Jesuits control of missionary activity and sent hundreds of "Black Robes" inland. Their efforts resulted primarily in stirring accounts of missionary courage and martyrdom, but few conversions.

From the late sixteenth century, Protestant Dutch traders with more efficient ships and single-minded commercial intensity successfully seized the bulk of Spanish Caribbean trade while simultaneously stripping Portugal of most of its Indian Ocean empire. Organizing themselves under speculative joint-stock trading companies that were given monopolies and rights to act with diplomatic and military authority, the Dutch established traders as quasi-governmental agents pursuing profitable trade at minimal cost in the name of religious and commercial war. In the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic the Dutch displaced the Portuguese from their most important factories, ruthlessly seizing the high-profit trade in spices and slaves. The Dutch pushed the English and French into the less profitable Indian trade in pepper and cotton textiles and into settlement colonies on islands like Barbados (1627) and Martinique (1635) where sugar was produced by Dutch-supplied slaves. In India, operating at the sufferance of the powerful Mogul empire, English and French company traders established factories, hoping to survive high mortality from disease long enough to amass fortunes. In the Caribbean significantly expanded production of sugar brought forth a flourishing economy in which European adventurers, half-castes, and escaped slaves engaged in opportunistic trading and piracy in a roiling, underpoliced area of multiple colonial frontiers.

The Dutch and the English combined strongly anti-Catholic religious attitudes with a secular profit motive. However, because Protestant religion rejected religious orders, lacked central leadership, and possessed a theology emphasizing predestination, they produced few foreign missionaries. Instead, the logic of trade and the society of the trader defined northern European contact with the outside world, reflecting the strength of the urban commercial classes in Amsterdam and London. The result of northern European entry into international trade was a rapidly expanding Atlantic economy in which imperial consumption patterns—driven by a growing emulation of elite fashion—fed an emerging consumer revolution. As Britain, following a series of successful wars with the Dutch and French, established itself by the 1760s as Europe's most powerful trading nation, rapidly rising demand throughout western Europe for sugar, tobacco, Indian fabrics, coffee, and tea meant increasing standards of material and social existence, even for ordinary western Europeans.

At the center of this economy was an expanding slave trade shared by traders from the Dutch Republic, Portugal, France, Prussia, and Denmark, but dominated in the eighteenth century by the British, that expanded from an average of seven thousand to sixty thousand slaves per year between 1650 and 1760. Individual traders, trading dynasties, and absentee plantation owners made fortunes out of slaving. Accelerating internal demographic and economic pressures in Africa supported the growth of warrior states, which fed and were supported by the trade.

THE "SECOND" EUROPEAN IMPERIAL AGE: THE NORTHERN EUROPEAN POWERS

In the eighteenth century Europe slowly entered the era of its "second" empires, dominated at first by the English and French, joined later in the nineteenth century most prominently by the Germans, Belgians, and Italians, as European hegemony was extended into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Cultural frontiers were eroded in these centuries of intimate and sustained contact with Old World societies. European traders penetrated more deeply into regions opened by treaty or direct rule (as in China and India) and exploration (as in the Pacific Islands and Africa). Of profound importance to Christian missions, Protestant churches, under the influence of German pietism and English evangelicalism, launched a second wave of proselytizing that had deep impact in these areas.

The often independent activities of traders could have substantial impact in this environment. In India, which became a crucial possession in the second British empire, the first bridgehead was seized in Bengal, where success was due in part to the effective infiltration of Indian states by rival English and French company traders acting to capitalize on local rivalries in an era of declining Mogul power. Led by a company trader turned soldier, Robert Clive, the British East India Company emerged in the 1770s as the dominant Indian power, able to plunder Bengali government revenue. Fantastic enrichment of company traders generated debate in Britain over how a "legitimate" empire should be administered and the inauguration of more strictly controlled imperial governance. A similar process also led to the opening of China to western trade in the 1840s when independent traders built a flourishing market for smuggled opium in China, and convinced the British government to bombard Chinese ports in the name of "free trade" when Chinese authorities seized their illegal stocks from Guangzhou (Canton) trading factories. The Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860) forced open more ports to western traders and missionaries from France, Germany, and North America, as well as Britain, while the humiliations suffered by the Chinese government helped initiate the catastrophic civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion.

"Scientific" exploration and imperial systems of knowledge. Continuing European rivalries, particularly between the French and English, ushered in an era of state-sponsored "scientific" exploration designed to establish geographical knowledge in the service of imperial ambition. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's 1766–1769 exploratory surveys of the South Pacific were a model followed by Captain James Cook's 1768 voyage to the South Pacific where he discovered and claimed the eastern coast of Australia and several islands, including New Zealand, for Britain. Rationalized programs to compile economic and strategic inventories of geographical, botanical, and anthropological information were sponsored by learned societies—most notably the Royal Society in London—which not only pressed for exploration of the South Pacific, but also the Arctic and Africa. Despite the high casualty rate of early African explorers owing to disease, from the 1790s African exploration engaged many British, French, and German adventurers. Exploration spurred new interest among secular intellectuals to examine the nature of humanity. Prominent philosophes in France, like Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as Scottish realist philosophers, employed visions of the "savage" that were gleaned from reports of South Seas explorations and the rediscovery of the writings of many earlier Spaniards to criticize European social and political structures.

Additionally, attempts were made to identify attributes that distinguished "civilized" social organization. These invariably favored Mediterranean cultures, followed by the Chinese, Indians and Arabs, pastoral peoples such as Mongols and Turks, and the hunter-gatherers of North America, Africa, and Australia. By the late eighteenth century these classifications were increasingly associated with presumed biological differences of race; by the mid-nineteenth century, the catalog of races was largely fixed along a color line, with the capacity for civilization descending through white, yellow, brown, red, and black. This catalog remained contested, however, particularly by missionaries, who, despite tendencies to ethnocentrism, were disposed to argue that all peoples could be raised to a common level of civilization. One important arena for the contest lay in the widely publicized exploration of Africa where the paternalistic evangelical argument for development articulated by missionary and explorer David Livingstone was implicitly pitted against the "scientific" racism characteristic of many secular explorers, like the scholar and adventurer Richard Burton, though all European travelers constructed African exploration as a narrative of "manly" European actions and "native" inferiority.

By the nineteenth century many European explorers and missionaries, although profoundly convinced of the superiority of Western civilization, were also deeply influenced by anxieties connected to emerging industrial and urban conditions at home. The growth of the factory system, crowded cities, the social challenges of poverty and class, and new standards of "respectable" conformity could all encourage individuals to seek independence and a sense of usefulness or adventure in colonial exploits. Over the course of the century increasing numbers of missionaries found contact with "primitivism" and the challenge of native conversion preferable to growing secularism in Europe itself.

Protestant missionaries and colonialism. The expansion of traders into Asian and African interiors brought rapid, often disruptive, changes to indigenous societies, not least because the staples of those trades were often guns, cash, and drugs like liquor and opium. Increasingly, traders came under the intense criticism of burgeoning numbers of Protestant missionaries. By the end of the eighteenth century the rise of evangelicalism unleashed a religious emotionalism that stressed freely chosen conversion, spiritual equality, and activism. Protestant missionary societies emerged suddenly in Britain, led by the Baptists (1792), Congregationalists (1795), and evangelical Anglicans (1799), to be followed by other denominations and in other nations like Switzerland and Germany. As part of a larger evangelical humanitarianism, missionary activity and the campaign to abolish slavery both emerged most strongly in northwestern Europe, especially Great Britain, and the northern American states—urbanizing and industrializing regions characterized by free contract labor and growing national identities emphasizing the legal rights of free citizens. Conservative reactions to the French Revolution helped direct evangelical attention away from domestic populations and into distant areas of exploration and European expansion: the South Seas and the recently seized Indian territories were the first places to receive missionaries.

Protestant missionary societies, operating predominantly from nations where the state had ceased enforcing religious conformity, were organized as voluntary associations that while often willing to accept state aid, rejected state control. William Carey (1761–1834), the pioneer Baptist missionary to India, was the most important theorist to the Anglo-American missionary movement. He urged that missionary organizations embrace "the spread of civil and religious liberty" as a reality and opportunity that among the western churches necessitated new methods of organization to secure mass lay and clerical support.

By the mid-nineteenth century, public meetings and rallies, often featuring returned missionaries, and the mass publication of books and periodicals (disseminated in Britain by the millions through a national network of local parish and chapel associations) emphasized the violence, subjugation, and ignorance purportedly bred of "heathen" religions, and the desperate need of non-Christians for European tutelage. Support for missions crossed class lines but was strongest, as was the recruitment of missionaries, among artisans, tradesmen, clerks, manufacturers, professionals, and other "respectable" classes. Leadership came from the educated middle classes (many university trained by century's end) and societies relied heavily on activist women both as organizers and financial supporters. By the first decade of the twentieth century approximately ten thousand voluntarily supported European Protestant missionaries (about 80 percent British, 15 percent German, 5 percent Scandinavian, French, Dutch, and Swiss, supplemented by a rapidly increasing American force of about four thousand) were concentrating their efforts in Africa, China, and India; a parallel revival of Catholic missions, strongly French and newly aided by voluntary organizations, fielded some eight thousand missionary priests.

European missions continued to have an ambivalent relationship with colonialism. Often operating in conjunction with imperial power, as in the founding of French missions in the Congo and Tahiti or British missions in New Zealand and Uganda, missions nevertheless often had strained relations with colonial authorities, while many missionaries expressed doubts about the value of western culture to evangelization. However, the continuing problem of communication meant considerable effort was spent on linguistic work that produced pioneering grammars and dictionaries for virtually every world language. Educational work resulted in the founding of over twenty thousand mission schools by century's end.

While such efforts did support colonial administration, as in India, missionaries were often highly critical of the religious neutrality practiced by their governors. Major social problems, especially those associated with slavery and "destructive" western trades in weapons and drugs, elicited missionary condemnations of imperial policy. Early in the century British missionaries encouraged trade in "legitimate" goods—especially cotton—envisioned as supporting working and trading communities of indigenous Christians. The failure of attempts to create such missionary communities in the West Indies (following Parliamentary abolition of British slavery in 1833) and both West and East Africa—and reinforced by the shock of colonial rebellions in India (1857) and Jamaica (1865)—caused some missionaries, especially charismatic evangelicals like those of the China Inland Mission (1865), to reject westernization strategies in favor of itinerant evangelization and the adoption of indigenous dress and manners. Many others reaffirmed commitments to strategies that had been designed to "leaven" indigenous societies in preparation for widespread conversion: the creation of orphanages, schools, and colleges (higher education being especially emphasized in India and China) was supplemented with the tutoring of women by women and medical work in dispensaries and hospitals.

As professionalized strategies increased, so did a "social work" emphasis in missions, to which women, and especially after 1885 unmarried women, were of growing importance; by 1899 women accounted for at least 56 percent of all British missionaries in the field, while as many as forty thousand Catholic sisters worked in charitable and educational missions. Overall, the variety of missionary responses to trade, colonial governance, and non-western cultures produced variable results. But as the century progressed, missionaries displayed an increased willingness to lobby for standard colonial governmental protections to safeguard their converts and institutions.

The impact of Christian missionaries in the modern world. The Christian message, with its strong egalitarian strains, had the potential to fundamentally subvert hierarchies and authority built on ethnic, historical, or racial arguments. Yet paternalistic missionary attitudes, which frequently assumed the superiority of Western economic and social organization, often supported colonial dependency. Indigenous responses varied widely. In India, for example, churches grew with late-century converts from the lowest castes, but more importantly both Hinduism and Islam were spurred to major reform movements and revivals by the religious and ethical challenges presented by Christianity and Western power. Africa, by contrast, saw missions evolve into flourishing African churches, but only after separatist African-led churches split from missions or charismatic leaders founded syncretic Christian sects that embraced traditional African beliefs. In every field, missions and their resources were used for local purposes, as in South Africa where in Methodist and Congregationalist missions indigenous chiefs retained considerable powers over local life while adopting market agriculture and accepting imperial protections lobbied for by missionaries. In these ways the self-supporting churches that had been the stated goal of missionary policy throughout the nineteenth century were achieved over the misgivings of white missionaries.

European missionaries were largely ineffective in responding to anti-imperialist critiques in the twentieth century. Missionary education served to shape educated elites and produced nationalist leaders in India, China, and Africa. However, the many real and imagined connections of missions to white power were emphasized by nationalists. In some areas missions met with disaster—in China, missionaries were expelled after the 1949 communist seizure of power. In others, like India, missions produced small minority communities, but failed at any meaningful dialogue with organized majority religions. In yet others missions could be succeeded by large indigenized churches, as in Africa, Korea, and Indonesia. European missionary societies remained active in the late twentieth century, but had little of the public profile and support or sense of cultural mission that characterized the nineteenth century. Instead, they evolved a philosophy of partnership and outreach, partially as a result of the postcolonial rise of independent churches throughout the world and the decline of activist European religiosity, partially through the growth of theological liberalism that spawned an ecumenical movement of world Christian cooperation. In the twentieth century, the educational, developmental, and humanitarian activities carried out by missions were extended by transnational nonprofit charitable corporations. However, the primary effect of the missionary

MARY KINGSLEY

Nineteenth-century European empires provided increasing opportunities for women in travel and professional pursuits. In missions women worked as educators and nurses, but outside of these religious institutions, because imperial structures excluded women, their primary roles were as writers and social observers, capable of delivering powerful commentaries on foreign peoples to a wide readership. European exploration from the eighteenth century onward became an increasingly publicized endeavor, and in the nineteenth century narratives of exploration, like those of David Livingstone, sold impressive numbers of books and spawned a growing market for travel writing. In this market women were increasingly able to compete, providing narratives of vicarious female intrepidity. From the 1870s onward, larger numbers of women journeyed abroad to ever more remote destinations: some few, like Florence Baker, were married to famous explorers, but most were single women freed financially and socially for travel by the deaths of male relatives.

Perhaps the most influential and extraordinary of these was the British traveler Mary Kingsley (1862–1900). After a life of duty to the care of her ailing parents, Mary Kingsley—self-educated (in the sciences and anthropology) and following the interests of her widely traveled father—embarked in 1892 upon a series of journeys in West Africa as "a beetle and fetish hunter." Her widely read Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899) were reinforced in their impact by her extensive and popular public lecturing.

Kingsley adopted the identity of pragmatic scientist—naturalist and anthropologist—but also embodied the profound ambivalence about gender roles that female travel evoked in her insistence on maintaining respectable Victorian attire throughout her African journeys. In a further elucidation of gender difference, she relinquished the vigorously domineering voice of the self-actualized male travel writer for self-deprecation, humor, and a willingness to credit the assistance received in her travels from traders and Africans alike. Coming to see the central conflict in West Africa as lying between missionaries and traders, Kingsley sided with the traders, decrying the attempts of missionaries to transform Africans, whom she saw as different in kind from Europeans, as naive and ignorant.

Supporting herself by trading with Africans in rubber and palm oil, and relying on the assistance of various trading "agents," Kingsley supported the imperial endeavor but lobbied the Colonial Office to leave the governance of West Africa to traders, who supplied Africans with necessary goods while allowing their "development" along more autonomous lines. Her expression of sympathy for the efforts of traders—such as her comment on the "terrible . . . life of a man in one of these out-of-the-way factories, with no white society, and with nothing to look at . . . but the one set of objects—the forest, the river, and the beach"—reinforced notions of the stoic European persevering in primitive environs. Yet her equal sympathy for Africans, their "remarkable mental acuteness and large share of common sense" and serious interest in their lives reinforced the exhortations from professional anthropologists that a clearer understanding of the integrated structure of indigenous societies was necessary. Her view that racial and cultural differences were to be appreciated rather than decried was set against common missionary assumptions that Europeanization and reform of "childlike" indigenous manners were an essential part of the "civilizing" colonial process.

Thus, despite antipathy to missionaries, Kingsley and late-century anthropologists advanced a general European change in attitudes that also brought increasing numbers of missionaries to more sophisticated and sympathetic attitudes to indigenous cultures.

movement from the Renaissance on has been the transformation of Christianity from an almost exclusively European faith to a far more eclectic world religion, with hundreds of millions of adherents in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The twentieth century, then, largely brought to an end the era of exploration, independent trading, and missionary activity as European pursuits carried out with almost complete cultural self-assurance. With the exploration of the polar caps in the first decades of the twentieth century, few frontiers remained that did not require the resources of a modern nation-state to explore. At the same time, the rise of modern multinational corporations and the creation of major communication and transport networks allowing retail marketing throughout the globe largely ended the age of the independent freebooting trader. Though the era of European world dominance has passed, the modern world has been significantly shaped by the economic, social, and cultural forces transmitted through the activities of exploration, trade, and proselytizing.

See also other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bickers, Robert A., and Rosemary Seton. Missionary Encounters: Sources and Issues. Richmond, Surrey, U.K., 1996. Selection of articles dealing with domestic organization of missionary societies, female medical missionaries, anthropological use of missionary archives, and other relevant topics.

Cox, Jeffrey. "The Missionary Movement." In Nineteenth-Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect. Edited by D. G. Paz. Westport, Conn., 1995. Pages 197–220. Provides an excellent overview of scholarly historiography of missions and underlying social and organizational themes in their development.

Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange; Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, Conn., 1972. A clear and detailed account of the impact of Old and New World contact.

Elliot, John Huxtable. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650. Cambridge, U.K., 1970. A concise synthesis of the impact of New World discoveries on European politics, economics, and culture.

Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, Mass., 1992. An illuminating and readable assessment of the challenges to tradition and strategies of interpretation used by Europeans to comprehend the information generated by the Age of Discovery.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago, 1991. An intriguing analysis of the rhetorical strategies used by the first generations of Europeans in their attempt to comprehend the New World.

Hall, Catherine. White, Male, and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. New York, 1992. Two key chapters provide a clear exposition of how British domestic models and class assumptions were inscribed in the abolition movement and missionary programs to reorder ex-slave societies in the West Indies, and how racial prejudice intensified at mid-century.

Marshall, Peter James, and Glyndwr Williams. The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass., 1982. Provides an excellent overview of changing conceptions of human societies and nature in the eighteenth century.

McNeill, William Hardy. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, N.Y., 1976. A classic analysis of the impact of epidemic disease throughout history.

Neill, Stephen. A History of Christian Missions. 2d ed. Revised by Owen Chadwick. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1986. A comprehensive account of Christian missionaries, heavily narrational and sympathetic to the missionary enterprise.

Porter, Andrew. "Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780–1914." Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20, no. 3 (1992): 370–390. An important assessment of the changing relationship between imperial government and missions stressing the importance of the interplay between missionary experience and theology.

Scammell, Geoffrey Vaughn. The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Empires, c. 800–1650. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981. An excellent series of brief and accessible histories of different national imperial experiences. Weaves exploration, trade, and missionary activity together with an eye to social and economic background and consequences.

Stanley, Brian. The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leicester, U.K., 1990. A detailed and critical analysis that emphasizes the unique imperial perspective of missionaries. The only comparative account available of British missions throughout the empire.