Amal Shahid

My project, which is part of the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza project ‘Moral and Economic Entrepreneurship in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe: A Collaborative history of Global Switzerland, c. 1830-1900’, studies connections of Protestant regions in German-speaking Europe with the Malabar coast in South India through the religious and economic activities of the Basel German Evangelical Mission.

What was the Basel Mission?

The Basel Mission (BM here on) was a society created in 1815 as a result of collaboration between elites, pietists, and evangelicals from present day Switzerland and South Germany. It sent missionaries for proselytization in British and Dutch colonies. The case of the BM has attracted scholarly attention because of its engagement with industrial activities alongside religious objectives. The BM arrived in Mangalore in 1834 for pursuing missionary activities, and set up an industrial branch of the mission in 1852 both to provide employment to converts and to finance itself. The industrial branch culminated in the Basel Mission Trading Company (Basler Handelsgesellschaft or BHG) by 1859. The industries included weaving, carpentry and tile-making. Other economic activities that remained a part of the Basel Mission included management of plantations and agricultural work in mission stations, as well as other activities such as pottery, lace-making, tailoring, rope and basket making.

Main Objectives

My project studies the BM as a micro-historical transimperial institution that integrated continental Protestant Europe into the British Empire, both culturally and economically. This enables me to uncover how a continental mission society, global in its practice, not only shaped socio-economic realities on the Malabar coast as in Swiss-Germany, but was also involved in capitalist processes which were enabled by colonial administrative structures. The latter created political and legal conditions for mission societies to acquire land, labour and capital, as well as utilized proselytization as a way of disciplining labour on plantations. I argue that Protestant missionaries were important actors in the process of globalization of imperial ideology and colonial capitalist institutions to those they considered unexposed civilizations.