Financing mission societies, capitalizing Protestantism: A transimperial history

Abstract

This article examines the transimperial fundraising practices of two major continental European Protestant missionary societies—the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) and the Basel Mission (BM)—between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the 1870s. It proposes a meso-level approach to global history that focuses neither on individual actors nor on abstract categories such as capitalism or religion, but instead on organizations. By analysing the PEMS and the BM, the article shows how missionary societies connected specific subregions of British India and Southern Africa with Protestant regions across the northern transatlantic world. Drawing on rarely studied financial reports, it demonstrates how these societies mobilized hundreds of thousands of donors through global financial networks spanning Europe, North America, and the colonies. In doing so, the article reframes Protestant missionary societies not merely as cultural actors but as economic institutions that helped normalize capitalist practices in both Europe and colonial settings. It thus contributes to transimperial and global history by suggesting a way to study Protestant continental Europe, the United States, and the British empire as mutually constitutive partners.