The Economics of Missionary Expansion:: Evidence from Africa and Implications for Development
Jedwab, Remi; Meier zu Selhausen, Felix; Moradi, Alexander
(2022) Journal of Economic Growth, volume 27, issue 2, pp. 149 - 192
(Article)
Abstract
How did Christianity expand in Africa to become the continent’s dominant religion? Using annual panel census data on Christian missions from 1751 to 1932 in Ghana, and pre-1924 data on missions for 43 sub-Saharan African countries, we estimate causal effects of malaria, railroads and cash crops on mission location. We
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find that missions were established in healthier, more accessible, and richer places before expanding to economically less developed places. We argue that the endogeneity of missionary expansion may have been underestimated, thus questioning the link between missions and economic development for Africa. We find the endogeneity problem exacerbated when mission data is sourced from Christian missionary atlases that disproportionately report a selection of prominent missions that were also established early.
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Keywords: Africa, Atlases, Christianity, Economic persistence, Economics of religion, Historical data, Human capital, Measurement, Missions, Religious diffusion, Economics and Econometrics
ISSN: 1381-4338
Publisher: Springer
Note: Funding Information: We gratefully thank Oded Galor, three anonymous referees, Robert Barro, Sascha Becker, James Fenske, Ewout Frankema, Laurence Iannaccone, Timur Kuran, Stelios Michalopoulos, Dozie Okoye, Elias Papaioannou, Jared Rubin, Felipe Valencia Caicedo, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Leonard Wantchekon for their helpful comments. We are grateful to seminar audiences at AEHN (Wageningen, Sussex), ASREC (Bologna, Luxembourg), Belfast, Bocconi, Bolzano, CEPR Economics of Religion (Venice), CSAE (Oxford), Dalhousie, EHES (T?bingen), EHS (Keele), GDE (Zurich), George Mason, George Washington, Frankfurt, G?ttingen, Ingolstadt, Munich, Namur, Passau, Stellenbosch, Sussex, T?bingen, Utrecht, Warwick and WEHC (Boston). We thank Nathan Nunn, Julia Cag? and Valeria Rueda, Morgan Henderson and Warren Whatley, for sharing their datasets. We thank Madeline De Quillacq for excellent research assistance. Meier zu Selhausen gratefully acknowledges financial support of the British Academy (Postdoctoral Fellowship no. pf160051 - Conversion out of Poverty? Exploring the Origins and Long-Term Consequences of Christian Missionary Activities in Africa) Funding Information: Financing the Mission. Protestant mission societies initially depended on the financial support from congregations and philanthropists in Europe and the US (Miller ; Quartey ). Cash-strapped mission committees relied on print propaganda, which sensationalized images of tropical missionary benevolence to elicit funding from Western readers (Pietz ; Maxwell ). Those donations paid for the missionaries’ homeland training, the sea journey to Africa and initial set-up costs (Johnson ). Metropolitan funding remained limited however. In order to expand, the missionary budget had to be raised from within Ghana. Moreover, the mission societies’ declared ultimate goal was to develop self-financing African churches (Welbourn ). Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).
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