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

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

‘“What,” some simple-minded man might say, “is the connection between the Gospel and commerce?’”¹ Speaking in Leeds in May 1860 on behalf of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was characteristically robust with his rhetorical question and no less direct in furnishing the answer. ‘There is a great connection between them. In the first place, there is little hope of promoting commerce in Africa, unless Christianity is planted in it; and, in the next place, there is...