# **Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885–1914** Purity, Health and Cleanliness

Linda Maria Ratschiller Nasim

### Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

Series Editors

Richard Drayton, Department of History, King's College London, London, UK Saul Dubow, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a wellestablished collection of over 100 volumes focussing on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures that emerged from, and challenged, colonial rule. The collection includes transnational, comparative and connective studies, as well as works addressing the ways in which particular regions or nations interact with global forces. In its formative years, the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, but there is now no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world that lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus that help to set new research agendas. As well as history, the series includes work on politics, economics, culture, archaeology, literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on world history and to make this available to a broad scholarly readership in a timely manner.

Linda Maria Ratschiller Nasim

# Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885–1914

Purity, Health and Cleanliness

Linda Maria Ratschiller Nasim Department of Contemporary History University of Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland

ISSN 2635-1633 ISSN 2635-1641 (electronic) Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies ISBN 978-3-031-27127-4 ISBN 978-3-031-27128-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27128-1

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023. This book is an open access publication.

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Cover Credit: Grosse Wäsche im Beremfluss (Kyebi), BMA QQ-30.027.0307, Basler Missionsbuchhandlung, Basel, Switzerland / BM Archives

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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*In loving memory of Ida (1920–2022), who sparked my interest in history from a young age.*

## Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to all the people who have contributed to shaping the outcome of this intellectual journey. I am especially grateful to Siegfried Weichlein, Christina Späti, Richard Hölzl and Martina King for providing extended commentary on this book's original manuscript. Very much in line with the knowledge produced by the Basel Mission doctors, this book is a product of a protracted process of entanglements and negotiations between different people and places, networks and institutions.

Siegfried Weichlein continually supported the realisation of this endeavour by providing intellectual stimuli, securing funding and initiating conferences and book projects. His passion for history is truly contagious, never ceasing to spur my curiosity for new perspectives on the past. Together, we spun up networks with colleagues interested in the histories of mission, science and colonialism in Basel, Berlin, Cambridge, Göttingen and beyond. I particularly benefitted from exchanges with Rebekka Habermas, Patrick Harries, David Maxwell, Paul Jenkins, Jakob Zollmann, Svenja Goltermann and Bernhard C. Schär. I am especially thankful for the fruitful cooperation and enriching conversations with Karolin Wetjen.

My institutional affiliation at the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Fribourg continuously provided me with fresh perspectives thanks to my colleagues' wide range of expertise. I would like to thank them for their many informal and formal contributions to this project. Simone Rees and Barbara Miller, in particular, have offered valuable insights from their work on Swiss Catholic missionaries in twentieth-century Zimbabwe. I share with them a passion for conveying new insights on Switzerland's colonial past to a wider public and I am grateful for their hard work in creating our website www.colonial-local.ch.

Damir Skenderovic, Christina Späti and Francesca Falk entrusted me with the coordination of the Doctoral Programme "Migration and Postcoloniality Meet Switzerland" at the University of Fribourg from 2014 to 2021. This role significantly contributed to my understanding of the research landscape and shaped the conceptual frameworks at the heart of this book. I would like to thank them for this valuable opportunity.

A large part of the original sources on which this study is built are held in the Basel Mission archives. My recognition goes to the team there who have supported my research ever since my first visit to their collection in 2009. I also thank the staff and librarians at the British Library, the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Basel-Stadt and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

The many years of research that went into this book would not have been possible without generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). I am very grateful for their support of project number 153079 ("Hygiene Abroad and at Home: The Basel Mission Doctors and Spaces of Knowledge 1885–1914") and particularly the open-access grant number 218060 which allows for the book's wider distribution.

I count myself lucky for the network of family and friends in Switzerland, London, Cape Town and Berlin who have encouraged me, all in their own ways, from culinary inspirations to regular distractions during urban and rural discovery trips. I am most indebted to my devoted exploration companion, Faisal, who has provided knowledgeable feedback and emotional support throughout this journey. I dedicate this book to him in anticipation of the winding road ahead of us, and to our children Nahla and Djibril who have opened up a new chapter in the unexpected journey we call life.

## Cover Image

In analysing the cover image, we encounter a problem that often arises when working with mission archives. Despite their rich visual legacy, mission archives offer few clues about the creation of images and even less about the protagonists who feature in them. In this case, we also have no information on the number of copies printed or the channels in which they were distributed. However, this picture represents many of the themes woven into this book.

The cover image is a postcard produced by the Basel Mission between 1901 and 1917, showing people "doing the washing in the River Berem (Kyebi)", in modern-day Ghana. The Basel Mission used postcards for advertising and fundraising purposes and became one of the most important producers of colonial knowledge in Switzerland, Southern Germany and beyond. The fact that this postcard was reproduced in colour in the early twentieth century indicates that the Basel Mission spared no expense or effort in promoting their civilising mission.

The postcard shows a seemingly banal activity: women and children washing their clothes in a river. Yet it entails considerable ambiguity. For the Basel Mission, and other institutions involved with the civilising mission, an important argument in justifying their need for intervention was a lack of cleanliness among the people they wished to refine. Simultaneously, this image reveals that the concern for hygiene was a basic human need found around the world. The Basel Mission navigated between these two contradicting messages in their search for support.

By selling, buying, writing, sending and receiving this postcard, people communicated across social and geographical divides. Despite being clearly staged with the children staring at the camera's lens, it nourished colonial curiosity by offering seemingly rare insights into Africans' everyday lives. Europeans who set eyes on this postcard looked these children straight in the eyes. Their gazes crossed. This form of appeal for donations persists in the visual representation of Africans to this day.

Images from the colonial period are strikingly often characterised by their focus on bodily practices. They make clear that colonialism was always more than ideology, politics, military conflicts and economic exploitation. European missionaries set out to reform peoples' bodies, combining ideas of purity, health and cleanliness in their endeavour. This book focuses on six medical missionaries, who offer a fine example of how religious, scientific and colonial efforts for hygiene came together during High Imperialism.

## Contents

## Abbreviations

## List of Figures

#### xviii LIST OF FIGURES

## Introduction

### 1.1 Thematic Introduction

In 1881, the Evangelical Missionary Society in Basel advertised a scientific position for a medical research expedition to the Gold Coast.1 Since the launch of missionary work in the area in 1828, more than 150 Basel missionaries had lost their lives prematurely, mostly due to what they identified as tropical fevers. The Basel Mission leadership, referred to as the Committee, chose Ernst Mähly, a practising doctor from Basel and devout Pietist, from 46 candidates to fill this position. His role involved researching the causes of disease and compiling facts about "the hygienic conditions of Europeans in the tropics" by considering their housing, clothing, diet and means of travel.2 Mähly spent nearly two years in West Africa. Upon his return to Basel, he published his insights in a wide range of publications from scientific journals and missionary magazines to colonial periodicals.3

1 The job advertisement appeared in the *Berliner klinischen Wochenschrift*, the *Correspondenzblatt für Schweizer Ärzte*, the *Allgemeine Schweizer Zeitung* and the Basel Mission's popular monthly magazine *Der Evangelische Heidenbote.*

2 Committee report, 14.09.1881, BMA, Komitee-Protokoll 1881, §409.

3 Ernst Mähly, Die Gesundheitsverhältnisse auf der Goldküste, in: Evangelisches Missionsmagazin 29 (1885) p. 396–417, 445–461; Ibid., Zur Geographie und Ethnographie der Goldküste, in: Verhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Basel 7

© The Author(s) 2023 L. M. Ratschiller Nasim, *Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885–1914*, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27128-1\_1

1

In 1885, Mähly contributed a piece to the *Proceedings of the Society for Natural Sciences in Basel*, dealing with the geography and ethnography of the Gold Coast:

On this occasion it is worth considering the bad smell, which blacks are infamous for, mainly due to accounts of slave traders and holders; the same is extremely rare with the population on the Gold Coast, which meticulously observes bodily cleanliness and also washes light garments diligently, and if it is to be found with some individuals nonetheless, they are derided by their community.4

Mähly's depiction, which contradicted the negative characterisation of Africans disseminated by slave traders and holders, sheds light on the historical context in which the Basel Mission had emerged 70 years earlier. Created in 1815, during an evangelical revival on the European continent, the Basel Mission resulted from the synergy of the city's bourgeoisie and devout Pietists. The founding members of the mission seminary understood their evangelising aspirations as an atonement for the transatlantic slave trade initiated and controlled by Europeans, as was the case for most mission societies emerging around 1800.5 The first young men to complete their training in Basel worked for British and Dutch mission societies, mainly the Church Missionary Society, which held close ties with the British abolition movement.6

(1885) 3, p. 809–852; Ibid., Über das sogenannte "Gallenfieber" an der Goldküste, in: Correspondenz-Blatt für Schweizer Ärzte 15 (1885), p. 73–79, 108–116; Ibid., Akklimatisation und Klimafieber, in: Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 3 (1886), p. 72–83; Ibid., Gesundheitszustand bzw. Sterblichkeit auf der Goldküste und in Westafrika überhaupt, in: Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 3 (1886), p. 555–559; Ibid., Akklimatisation und Klimafieber, in: Evangelisches Missionsmagazin 30 (1886), p. 129–147.

4 Mähly, Zur Geographie und Ethnographie der Goldküste, p. 842.

5 Karl Rennstich, The Understanding of Mission, Civilisation and Colonialism in the Basel Mission, in: Torben Christensen/William R. Hutchison (eds.), Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880–1920, Aarhus 1983, p. 94–103; Brian Stanley, Christian Missions, Antislavery and the Claims of Humanity, c. 1813–1873, in: Sheridan Gilley/ Brian Stanley (eds.), World Christianities c. 1815–c. 1914, Cambridge 2006, p. 443–457.

6 Founding members of the Church Missionary Society established in 1799 included famous abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, John Benn and John Newton. See Elizabeth Elbourne, The Foundation of the Church Missionary Society. The Anglican Missionary Impulse, in: John Walsh/Colin Haydon/Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c. 1689–1833, Cambridge 1993, p. 247–264.

From 1821, the Basel Mission set up their own mission stations abroad, including on the Gold Coast in 1828 and in Cameroon from 1885. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Basel Mission evolved into one of the most significant evangelical mission societies, involved in many different fields of activity such as trade, agriculture, education and medicine. Mähly's employment reflected a radical shift within the Committee regarding the significance of medical sciences for physical and spiritual healing. Whilst the Basel missionaries in West Africa had been requesting the presence of a mission doctor for decades, scientific medicine only became part and parcel of the Basel Mission in 1885. The Basel Mission became the first German-speaking evangelical mission society to launch a sustained medical mission with scientifically trained mission doctors by formulating theological arguments for the value of mission medicine.

The Basel Mission doctors operated as scientific field workers and intermediaries between remote regions in the colonial world and metropolitan interest groups. Their long-term observations and insights into health environments hitherto unknown to Europeans cemented their position as valuable medical experts. The fact that Mähly's findings appeared in several renowned scientific journals such as the *Proceedings of the Society for Natural Sciences in Basel* clearly identified him as part of the scientific establishment. Before his journey to the west coast of Africa in 1882, Mähly had attended the University of Munich, where he took classes with Max von Pettenkofer, Germany's most prominent figure in experimental hygiene at the time.7 He further underlined his scientific expertise by drawing on medical terminology:

I did not discover something specific in these cases; exactly the same excessive or abnormal perspiration along with rapid decomposition of fatty acids on the skin is to be found with Europeans. Where washing water is missing, the black and his dress principally smell of smoke caused by the constant fire burning by, or even in, the hut; and when he has eaten fish dried in the air, one can indeed tell; moreover, sick people, especially when they have daubed themselves with soil, do not spout pleasant fragrances. However, never has my nasal organ in an African hut been insulted by the sort of

7 Martin Weyer-von Schoultz, Max von Pettenkofer, 1818–1901. Die Entstehung der modernen Hygiene aus den empirischen Studien menschlicher Lebensgrundlagen, Frankfurt a. M. 2006; Wolfgang G. Locher, Max von Pettenkofer: Pionier der wissenschaftlichen Hygiene, Regensburg 2018.

unqualifiable, infernal air so often blowing towards us from the housing of our proletariat.8

Mähly's anthropological account challenged common stereotypes about Africans and significantly differs from most colonial sources originating in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to widespread racial theories, he denied any fundamental physical differences between people on the Gold Coast and in Europe. He recorded that when Africans smelled, it was not because of natural but cultural and social reasons.9 This distinction was central to the message of the Basel Mission since it meant that the status quo could be changed. Crucially, the Basel Mission's aspirations were not limited to converting Africans to Christianity but also to transforming entire societies economically, socially and medically.

By comparing the smell in huts on the Gold Coast to that found in proletarian flats in Europe, Mähly contributed to a colonial discourse that stressed the need to civilise both the people in the colonies and the working class in Europe.10 The Basel Mission represented the outward expression of a welfare system initiated by awakened Pietists and Basel patricians in light of the increasingly pressing social question in nineteenth-century Basel. The home mission movement, known as *Innere Mission* in German, tackled the ostensible problem of de-Christianisation within Europe and fundamentally depended on voluntary work, especially by women and children. Welfare facilities such as poverty and medical relief, Bible circles, Sunday schools, youth associations and the Basel City Mission, founded in 1859, recruited personnel and funds from the same pool of resources as the Basel Mission.

On closer inspection, Mähly's clarifications contradicted a prominent narrative of the Basel Mission, which portrayed missionaries as operating

8 Mähly, Zur Geographie und Ethnographie der Goldküste, p. 842–843.

9 On the history of odour, see Alain Corbin, Le miasme et la jonquille. L'odorat et l'imaginaire sociale XVIIIe-XIXe siècles, Paris 1982; Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell, Urbana 2014.

10 John Comaroff/Jean Comaroff, Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa, in: Karen Tranberg Hansen (ed.), African Encounters with Domesticity, New Brunswick 1992, p. 37–74; Susan Thorne, "The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable". Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain, in: Frederick Cooper/Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley et al. 1997, p. 238–262.

on the frontier of hygiene, where people lived in dirt, ignorance and sin. His observation that people who smelled were "derided by their community" demonstrated that physical cleanliness played an important role in West African societies, despite official mission propaganda suggesting otherwise. Upon their arrival in West Africa, the Basel missionaries encountered existing bodily knowledge, engrained values and practices of purity, health and cleanliness, which they tried to understand and relate to their own experiences.11

This book moves beyond the dichotomy of dominance and resistance to examine how entanglements of hygiene between West Africa and Europe around 1900 shaped religious, scientific and colonial bodies of knowledge.12

By tracing the multiple interactions and negotiations of six Basel Mission doctors between West Africa and Europe from 1885 to 1914, it demonstrates how notions of religious purity, scientific health and colonial cleanliness came together in the making of hygiene around 1900.13 The heyday of Protestant medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline during what became known as the Scramble for Africa. The focus on medical missionaries reveals that these projects were intertwined in many ways and that

11 On the importance of bodily cleanliness and ritual cleansing on the Gold Coast in pre-colonial times, see Thomas C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante, Cambridge/New York 1995. See further, Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe, Durham/London 1996.

12 This study employs "West Africa" and "Europe" as analytical categories while acknowledging that their exact meanings remained constantly in flux, despite historical actors suggesting otherwise and often using them as self-explanatory terms. In the source material, "West Africa" is frequently identified as a region by missionaries, colonial authorities and scientists, referring for instance to "British West Africa" and "German West Africa". The sheer diversity in languages and histories certainly made it difficult for commentators to differentiate between more specific regions within West Africa. At the same time, the region referred to as West Africa by both observers in the nineteenth century and historians today does share an extensive history, of trade and slavery for example.

13 These six Basel Mission doctors were Rudolf Fisch, Alfred Eckhardt, Friedrich Hey, Hermann Vortisch, Arthur Häberlin and Theodor Müller. Ernst Mähly operated in West Africa before the start of the medical mission in 1885, and Karl Huppenbauer started working on the Gold Coast in 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War interrupted most of the Basel Mission's activities in West Africa. For further details, see the short biographies in the appendix.

hygiene played an important role in all three of them. How did religious notions of purity, scientific concepts of health and colonial views of cleanliness and civilisation combine with one another to constitute hygienic knowledge between 1885 and 1914?

### 1.2 Research Review

This monograph focuses on six Basel Mission doctors who worked on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon, from 1885 to 1914, to analyse how knowledge of hygiene was negotiated and transformed through contact with places and people in West Africa. Hygiene constitutes one of the "magic words of modernity, a magic word with a turbulent history," as Philipp Sarasin has argued.14 Today, the term is primarily used to describe germ-free cleanliness while the notion of "racial hygiene" still reminds us of the murderous connotation it adopted in the twentieth century. The knowledge of hygiene that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by contrast, proved to be both more comprehensive than present-day meanings of hygiene and more complex than the later usage of the word for totalitarian and eugenic projects of cleansing.

Studies on the historical genesis of hygiene, such as Sarasin's seminal history of the body, have identified hygiene as a distinctly bourgeois project taking root in eighteenth-century Europe.15 The role of religious campaigners, however, in promoting new ideas and practices of health and cleanliness has been widely underrated. This is particularly true for the greater area around Basel, where the social question and public health issues were addressed by distinctly pious policy-makers and supported by

14 Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen. Eine Geschichte des Körpers, 1765–1914, Frankfurt a. M. 2003, p. 17.

15 Beatrix Mesmer, Reinheit und Reinlichkeit. Bemerkungen zur Durchsetzung der häuslichen Hygiene in der Schweiz, in: Nicolai Bernard/Quirinus Reichen (eds.), Gesellschaft und Gesellschaften. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Professor Dr. Ulrich Im Hof, Bern 1982, p. 470–494; Gerd Göckenjan, Kurieren und Staat machen. Gesundheit und Medizin in der bürgerlichen Welt, Frankfurt a. M. 1985; Alfons Labisch, Homo Hygienicus. Gesundheit und Medizin in der Neuzeit, Frankfurt a. M. 1992; Barbara Koller, Gesundes Wohnen. Ein Konstrukt zur Vermittlung bürgerlicher Werte und Verhaltensnormen und seine praktische Umsetzung in der Deutschschweiz 1880–1940, Zürich 1995; Manuel Frey, Der reinliche Bürger. Entstehung und Verbreitung bürgerlicher Tugenden in Deutschland, 1760–1860, Göttingen 1997; Philipp Sarasin, The Body as Medium. Nineteenth-Century European Hygiene Discourse, in: Grey Room 29 (2007), p. 48–65.

a broad coalition of evangelical activists. Crucially, the people involved in the hygiene movement in Basel and the Alemannic surroundings did not limit themselves to their immediate vicinities but extended their efforts in propagating new values and behaviours of hygiene overseas, where their prominent mission society had established stations.

The history of hygiene remains incomplete without taking into account the knowledge that was acquired in imperial enterprises and colonial settings. Hygiene was a key dimension of colonialism, initially in allowing for imperial expansion and subsequently in bolstering what was conceived as the civilising mission.16 Surprisingly little attention, however, has been paid in the history of hygiene and colonialism to the main protagonists of the civilising mission: Christian missionaries. Johannes Fabian's 1990 essay on *Religious and Secular Colonization* pointed to this shortcoming by arguing that there were "much older and deeper associations between physical hygiene and spiritual as well as political self-possession enabling colonial agents to take command over others."17

To trace the connected histories of evangelicalism, scientific medicine and colonialism in the making of hygiene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book combines three fields of research and their historiographies: mission history, particularly mission medicine; the history of science, with a focus on tropical medicine; and colonial history,

16 Nancy Rose Hunt, Negotiated Colonialism: Domesticity, Hygiene and Birth Work in the Belgian Congo, Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison 1992; Andreas Eckert, Sauberkeit und "Zivilisation": Hygiene und Kolonialismus in Afrika, in: Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen 26 (1997) 1, p. 16–19; Walter Bruchhausen, "Practising Hygiene and Fighting the Natives' Diseases". Public and Child Health in German East Africa and Tanganyika Territory, 1900–1960, in: Dynamis 23 (2003), p. 85–113; Ibid., Die "hygienische Eroberung" der Tropen. Gesundheitsschutz als europäischer Export in kolonialer und nachkolonialer Zeit, in: "Sei Sauber…!" Eine Geschichte der Hygiene und der öffentlichen Gesundheitsvorsorge in Europa, ed. by Musée d'Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg, Köln 2004, p. 204–217; Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene. A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, Basingstoke/New York 2004; Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines, Durham/London 2006; Robert Peckham/David M. Pomfret (eds.), Imperial Contagions. Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia, Hong Kong 2013.

17 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology. Critical Essays 1971–1991, Chur et al. 1991, p. 163.

specifically the knowledge produced in colonial entanglements. By themselves, these topics have gained considerable scholarly attention, yet the interconnections between them remain underexposed.

### *1.2.1 Mission History and Medicine*

Mission history offers fertile ground to examine how knowledge travelled between continents during the colonial period.18 Through their far-reaching networks and extensive media, mission societies created longlasting entanglements across the world. A wide range of actors both at home and abroad participated in forging and maintaining these connections, including missionaries and their wives, parishioners, donors, staff members, knowledge brokers, mission directors, members of missionary support groups, editors, itinerant preachers, traders and scientists as well as regional and colonial authorities. They communicated through a variety of channels and exchanged ideas, images and objects. The knowledge emerging from these exchanges had a bearing beyond individual mission societies, prompting large-scale debates about the body, religious principles, cultural identities, scientific assumptions, social issues and political questions, shaping material conditions in societies around the globe.19

18 Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire. Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850, Cambridge 2005; Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians. Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa, Oxford 2007; Rebekka Habermas, Wissenstransfer und Mission. Sklavenhändler, Missionare und Religionswissenschaftler, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010) 2, p. 257–284; Ulrich van der Heyden/Andreas Feldtkeller (eds.), Missionsgeschichte als Geschichte der Globalisierung von Wissen. Transkulturelle Wissensaneignung und -vermittlung durch christliche Missionare in Afrika und Asien im 17., 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart 2012; Patrick Harries/David Maxwell (eds.), The Spiritual in the Secular. Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa, Grand Rapids 2012; Linda Ratschiller/Siegfried Weichlein (eds.), Der schwarze Körper als Missionsgebiet. Medizin, Ethnologie, Theologie in Afrika und Europa 1880–1960, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2016; David Maxwell, Religious Entanglements. Central African Pentecostalism, The Creation of Cultural Knowledge and the Making of the Luba Katanga, Wisconsin 2022.

19 Rebekka Habermas, Mission im 19. Jahrhundert. Globale Netze des Religiösen, in: Historische Zeitschrift 287 (2008) 3, p. 629–679; Helge Wendt, Mission transnational, trans-kolonial, global: Missionsgeschichtsschreibung als Beziehungsgeschichte, in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 105 (2011), p. 95–116; Rebekka Habermas/Richard Hölzl (eds.), Mission global. Eine Verflechtungsgeschichte seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2012; Christine Egger/Martina Gugglberger,

The rise of global and cultural perspectives has not only helped to lift mission history out of the disciplinary and historiographical isolation surrounding church history but also enlarged our understanding of the nineteenth-century religious landscape.20 Instead of describing this landscape with generalising and mutually exclusive categories of analysis, assuming either the dawn of a secular age or a sweeping religious revival, scholars have started asking how knowledge of the secular and the religious have reciprocally constituted and shaped each other in this period.21 Missionaries contributed to the making of secularism and religion on a global scale by categorising, for example, whether customs in Africa were part of the spiritual or worldly realm. Their reports and publications are

Editorial, in: ibid. (eds.), Missionsräume, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 24 (2013) 2, p. 5–18; Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire. Missionaries, M¯aori, and the Question of the Body, Durham/London 2014; Julia Hauser, German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut. Competing Missions, Leiden 2015; David Maxwell, The Missionary Movement in African and World History: Mission Sources and Religious Encounter, in: The Historical Journal 58 (2015) 4, p. 901–930; Elisabeth Engel, Encountering Empire. African American Missionaries in Colonial Africa, 1900–1939, Stuttgart 2015; Christine Egger, Transnationale Biographien. Die Missionsbenediktiner von St. Ottilien in Tanganjika 1922–1965, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2016; Linda Ratschiller/Karolin Wetjen (eds.), Verflochtene Mission. Perspektiven auf eine neue Missionsgeschichte, Köln/ Weimar/Wien 2018; Jenna M. Gibbs (ed.), Global Protestant Missions. Politics, Reform, and Communication 1730s–1830s, New York 2019; Michael Eckardt (ed.), Mission Afrika: Geschichtsschreibung über Grenzen hinweg. Festschrift für Ulrich van der Heyden, Stuttgart 2019; Karolin Wetjen, Mission als theologisches Labor: Koloniale Aushandlungen des Religiösen in Ostafrika um 1900, Stuttgart 2020; Richard Hölzl, Gläubige Imperialisten: Katholische Mission in Deutschland und Ostafrika (1830–1960), Frankfurt a. M./ New York 2021.

20 Christopher Alan Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford 2004, p. 325–365; Sebastian Conrad, Religion in der globalen Welt, in: ibid./Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Geschichte der Welt. Wege zur modernen Welt, 1750–1870, München 2016, p. 559–625.

21 Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914, Oxford 2001; Talal Asad (ed.), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford 2003; Markus Dressler/Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, Secularism and Religion-Making, Oxford 2011; Monika Wohlrab-Sahr/Marian Burchardt, Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities, in: Comparative Sociology 11 (2012), p. 875– 909; Rebekka Habermas (ed.), Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire. Transnational Approaches, New York/Oxford 2019; Philip Nord/Katja Guenther/Max Weiss (eds.), Formations of Belief. Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, Princeton 2019.

important sources to question the notion of separate spheres in the nineteenth century, since they crucially participated in the formation of these religious, scientific and colonial spaces of knowledge.

Mission societies conveyed stories and images to a broad European public that for the first time in history developed detailed ideas of people and places around the globe. Drawing inspiration from New Imperial History and postcolonial studies, historians have highlighted the significance of mission societies for the production of imagery about the colonial world and their role in the creation of identities in Europe, not only in imperial metropolises but also in remote corners of rural societies.22 Mission societies were rooted in specific regions within Europe with distinct denominational traditions, economic structures and social circumstances. At the same time, they operated in certain regions of Africa, Asia, America and Oceania, characterised by particular languages, histories and peoples.23

This study adopts an actor-based approach by focusing on medical missionaries, in order to trace the entanglements of religious, scientific and colonial knowledge in the making of hygiene. Nevertheless, it comprehends mission history as a transregional phenomenon. A transregional perspective is well suited to the empirical realities of missionary encounters and challenges the universal claim of the evangelical missionary movement.24 The unique geographical, social, economic,

22 Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England, Stanford 1999; Reinhard Wendt (ed.), Sammeln, Vernetzen, Auswerten. Missionare und ihr Beitrag zum Wandel europäischer Weltsicht, Tübingen 2001; Andreas Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission. Die Repräsentation der tamilischen Gesellschaft und Religion durch Leipziger Missionare 1840–1940, Wiesbaden 2003; Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860, Cambridge 2003; Rebekka Habermas, Colonies in the Countryside: Doing Mission in Imperial Germany, in: Journal of Social History 50 (2017), p. 502–517.

23 For actor-based and microhistorical approaches applied to mission history, see Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians; Helge Wendt, Die missionarische Gesellschaft. Mikrostrukturen einer kolonialen Globalisierung, Stuttgart 2011; Hauser, German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut; Kirsten Rüther, Zugänge zur Missionsgeschichte: Plädoyer für eine akteurszentrierte Geschichte religiöser Veränderung, in: Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft 100 (2016), p. 211–219.

24 Matthias Middell (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Transregional Studies, London/New York 2019; Paul Jenkins, Württemberg als Hauptsäule der historischen Basler Mission—transregionale Erwägungen über Entwicklungen bis 1914, in: Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 116 (2016), p. 29–54; Ulrike Freitag/Achim

cultural, political and spiritual environments meant that there was not one Basel Mission experience but many different types of regional manifestation. While missionaries undoubtedly contributed to the increasing interdependence of the world and their knowledge had global significance, their fields of action were always confined to particular regions both abroad and at home, which shaped the knowledge they produced.25

Mission medicine became an important point of contact between Africans and Europeans, providing the ground for intimate physical and spiritual interactions. By focussing on the development of clinical medicine, for instance, recent studies have shown that mission hospitals were often the only place where people in colonial Africa would have experienced medical care provided by Europeans.26 Africanists, anthropologists and historians have deepened our understanding of how medical missionaries adopted scientific practices and technologies to advance their religious agenda but ultimately saw themselves confronted with a persistent medical pluralism, which questioned the exclusivity of their healing and belief system. Thus, a more complex picture of medical missions has emerged than narratives of either colonial complicity or self-sacrificing benevolence.27

von Oppen (eds.), Translocality. The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective, Leiden 2010.

25 John Comaroff/Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Chicago 1991; Ibid., Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Chicago 1997; Patricia Grimshaw/Andrew May (eds.), Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange, Brighton/Portland/Toronto 2010; Hilde Nielssen/Inger Marie Okkenhaug/Karina Hestad Skeie (eds.), Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Unto the Ends of the World, Leiden/Boston 2011.

26 Walter Bruchhausen, Medicine Between Religious Worlds: The Mission Hospitals of South-East Tanzania During the Twentieth Century, in: Mark Harrison/Margaret Jones/ Helen Sweet (eds.), From Western Medicine to Global Medicine. The Hospital Beyond the West, Hyderabad 2009, p. 172–192; David Hardiman, The Mission Hospital 1880– 1960, in: Mark Harrison/Margaret Jones/Helen Sweet (eds.), From Western Medicine to Global Medicine. The Hospital Beyond the West, Hyderabad 2009, p. 198–220; Pascal Schmid, Medicine, Faith and Politics in Agogo: A History of Health Care Delivery in Rural Ghana, ca. 1925 to 1980, Wien/Zürich 2018.

27 Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills. Colonial Power and African Illness, Cambridge 1991, ch. 3, p. 55–76; Terence O. Ranger, Godly Medicine. The Ambiguities of Medical Mission in Southeastern Tanzania 1900–1945, in: Steven Feierman/John M. Janzen (eds.), The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa, Berkley/Los Anegels/Oxford 1992, p. 256–282; Charles M. Good, The Steamer Parish. The Rise and Fall of Missionary

The question of how the Basel Mission doctors participated in the production of hygienic knowledge is interwoven with the histories of race, domesticity and gender. While these specific topics have been treated carefully by scholars studying mission societies and missionaries, the significance of hygiene for mission history remains a blind spot.28 This is all the more regrettable since the subject of hygiene offers an excellent opportunity to link mission history to the histories of science and colonialism. The predominant representations of missionaries as living in the past, rejecting modernity and opposing scientific developments not only contradicted their self-image as people who controlled their natural and human environments with the help of technology and science, but also significantly contributed to excluding them from the history of science for

Medicine on an African Frontier, Chicago/London 2004; David Hardiman (ed.), Healing Bodies, Saving Souls. Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, Amsterdam/New York 2006; Markku Hokkanen, Medicine and Scottish Missionaries in the Northern Malawi Region 1875–1930. Quests for Health in a Colonial Society, Lewiston 2007; Patrick Harries/ Marcel Dreier, Medizin und Magie in Afrika. Eine Sozialgeschichte des Wissens, in: Nach Feierabend. Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte 8, Zürich 2012, p. 85–104; Walima T. Kalusa, Christian Medical Discourse and Praxis on the Imperial Frontier. Explaining the Popularity of Missionary Medicine in Mwinilunga District, Zambia, 1906–1935, in: Patrick Harries/David Maxwell (eds.), The Spiritual in the Secular. Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa, Grand Rapids 2012, p. 245–266; Hines Mabika, Shaping Swiss Medical Practice in South Africa Before Apartheid (1873–1948), in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 67 (2017) 3, p. 381–404.

28 Comaroff/Comaroff, Home-made Hegemony; Mary Taylor Huber/Nancy C. Lutkehaus (eds.), Gendered Missions. Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice, Ann Arbor 1999; Andreas Eckl, Grundzüge einer feministischen Missionsgeschichtsschreibung. Missionarsgattinnen, Diakonissen und Missionsschwestern in der deutschen kolonialen Frauenmission, in: Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst/Mechthild Leutner (eds.), Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien, Berlin 2009, p. 132–145; Rhonda Anne Semple, Missionary Women. Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission, Woodbridge/Rochester 2003; Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference. Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, Basingstoke 2012; Emily J. Manktelow, Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier, Manchester/New York 2013; David Maxwell, The Missionary Home as a Site for Mission: Perspectives from Belgian Congo, in: Studies in Church History 50 (2014), p. 428–455; Kirsten Rüther/Angelika Schaser/Jacqueline van Gent, Gender and Conversion Narratives in the Nineteenth Century. German Mission at Home and Abroad, Surrey 2015.

many years. Yet the reciprocal connections between missionary endeavours and scientific activities constitute a significant chapter in the global history of science, as a new generation of researchers has demonstrated.29

#### *1.2.2 History of Science and Tropical Medicine*

In examining actors that were both evangelical missionaries and medical scientists operating in West African colonies, this study contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the role of religion in the history of science. The colonial period provided the setting for profound exchanges and delineations between religious and scientific knowledge across the globe. This resulted in the emergence of new religious values and customs on the one hand, and the development of new scientific ideas and practices on the other. A number of recent historiographical shifts in the history of science have helped to push back on residual resistance to bringing religion and science under the same analytic lens and thus reinvigorated interest in mission societies and missionaries as relevant actors in the production of scientific knowledge.30

The most important historiographical shift was that the dissemination of scientific knowledge was no longer seen as a one-way process

29 John MacKenzie, Missionaries, Science and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Africa, in: Andrew Porter (ed.), The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2003, p. 106–130; David N. Livingstone, Scientific Inquiry and the Missionary Enterprise, in: Ruth Finnegan (ed.), Participating in the Knowledge Society. Researchers Beyond the University Walls, Basingstoke 2005, p. 50–64; Sujit Sivasundaram, A Global History of Science and Religion, in: Thomas Dixon/Geoffrey Cantor/Stephen Pumfrey (eds.), Science and Religion. New Historical Perspectives, Cambridge 2010, p. 177–197; John Stenhouse, Missionary Science, in: Hugh Richard Slotten/Ronald L. Numbers/David N. Livingstone (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 8: Modern Science in National, Transnational, and Global Context, Cambridge 2020, p. 90–107.

30 For general overviews of the history of science, see Richard Drayton, Science, Medicine and the British Empire, in: Robin W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5: Historiography, Oxford 1999, p. 264–276; Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, Chicago 2005; Kostas Gavroglou/Jürgen Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, Dordrecht 2007; Pratik Chakrabarti/Michael Worboys, Science and Imperialism since 1870, in: Hugh Richard Slotten/Ronald L. Numbers/David N. Livingstone (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 8: Modern Science in National, Transnational, and Global Context, Cambridge 2020, p. 9–31.

of progress that inevitably led to the demise of other forms of knowledge. By looking at science as a form of practice, historians were able to trace the history of science in everyday social and public life.31 Instead of assigning epistemic privilege to scientific knowledge, this allows one to examine the ways in which knowledge took on popular expertise in non-academic contexts. This more dynamic and fragmented account of knowledge focuses on the interactive creation of knowledge, rather than viewing it as already fully formed. Scholars now pay attention to the contexts of production, materiality, circulation, representation and transformation of knowledge and ask why certain knowledge was suppressed, lost or ignored while other knowledge obtained validity.32

Seeing science as socially constructed knowledge allowed scholars to question the Eurocentric narrative and analyse the complex histories of science around the world.33 The notion of networks has proven particularly fruitful to trace the global circulation of ideas, practices and

31 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge 1977; Jakob Vogel, Von der Wissenschafts- zur Wissensgeschichte. Für eine Historisierung der "Wissensgesellschaft", in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 30 (2004) 4, p. 639–660; Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, vol. 1: From Gutenberg to Diderot, Cambridge 2000; Ibid., A Social History of Knowledge, vol. 2: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia, Cambridge 2012; Ibid., What is the History of Knowledge? Cambridge/Malden 2015; Philipp Sarasin, Was ist Wissensgeschichte? in: Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 36 (2003), p. 159–172; Bozena Chołuj/Jan C. Joerden (eds.), Von der wissenschaftlichen Tatsache zur Wissensproduktion, Frankfurt a. M. 2007; Achim Landwehr, Wissensgeschichte, in: Rainer Schützeichel (ed.), Handbuch Wissenssoziologie und Wissensforschung, Konstanz 2007, p. 801–813; Wolfgang Kaschuba, Vorbemerkung. Wissensgeschichte als Gesellschaftsgeschichte, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34 (2008) 4, p. 419–424; Daniel Speich-Chassé/David Gugerli, Wissensgeschichte. Eine Standortbestimmung, in: Traverse (2012) 1, p. 85–100; Johan Östling et al. (eds.), Circulation of Knowledge. Explorations in the History of Knowledge, Lund 2018.

32 Jim Secord, Knowledge in Transit, in: Isis 95 (2004) 4, p. 654–672; Robert N. Proctor/Londa Schiebinger (eds.), Agnotology. The Making und Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford 2008; Andreas Beer/Gesa Mackenthun (eds.), Fugitive Knowledge. The Loss and Preservation of Knowledge in Cultural Contact Zones, Münster/New York 2015.

33 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Milton Keynes 1987; Ibid., Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford 2005; Simon Schaffer/Lissa Roberts/Kapil Raj/James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770– 1820, Sagamore Beach 2009; Diarmid A. Finnegan/Jonathan Jeffrey Wright (eds.), Spaces of Global Knowledge. Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire, Farnham 2015; Kapil Raj, Go-Betweens, Travelers, and Cultural Translators, in: Bernard Lightman (ed.), A Companion to the History of Science, New York 2016, p. 39–57.

technologies during the colonial age. At the same time, the study of networks must be complemented with questions of privilege, power and inequality, especially when dealing with imperial networks. As cultural polyglots, the Basel Mission doctors positioned themselves at the interface of religious, scientific and colonial networks. Their knowledge production shows that the movement of ideas, practices and images between Europe and West Africa was a two-way process. However, their encounters were characterised by marked power imbalances and the flows of knowledge were neither qualitatively nor quantitatively equal.

The question as to what extent science, medicine and technology enabled imperial expansion and the consolidation of colonial rule remains a central bone of contention. Scholars who have created and endorsed the notion of colonial science have elaborated on the political role of knowledge produced during the colonial age and debunked the understanding of science as a universalist, disinterested form of knowledge driven by the organised scepticism of the involved scientists. To them we owe valuable insights into the ways in which scientists, including explorers, botanists, physicians, missionaries and their technologies, such as surveys, maps, microscopes and quinine advanced the colonial project. This scholarship has also demonstrated how knowledge acquired on imperial frontiers stimulated the formation of new scientific methods, disciplines and institutions in nineteenth-century Europe.34

Yet historians who have criticised the concept of colonial science point out that relying on science and technology to achieve political aims was no unique feature of colonial powers. Moreover, they have argued that reducing science to a tool of empire ignores the partially divergent interests between scientists and colonial states.35 This critique has given rise

34 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire. Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford 1981; Ibid., Power Over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present, Princeton 2010; James E. McClellan, Colonialism and Science. Saint Domingue in the Old Regime, Baltimore 1992; Ibid./François Regourd, The Colonial Machine. French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime, Turnhout 2011; Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the 'Improvement' of the World, New Haven 2000; Ibid., Knowledge and Empire, in: Peter James Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century, Oxford 2001, p. 231–251.

35 Helen Tilley offered a comprehensive critique of colonial science in her 2011 publication *Africa as a Living Laboratory*, opposing any simplified polarisation between scientific and non-European knowledge in colonial settings and claiming that colonialism did not comprehensively destroy African forms of knowledge. She argued that knowledge emerged to studies that analyse the diversity of scientific activities across the colonial world by paying attention to the natural, political, cultural and social circumstances of specific localities.36 A major concern for much of current research is to overcome large-scale, generalising and mutually exclusive categories of analysis, such as "indigenous knowledge" or "Western science," since they are themselves products of colonial history. While it continues to be useful to consider science as an instrumental part of political control and economic exploitation in the colonies, focus now lies on detailed examinations of interactions between competing epistemologies in concrete places around the world.37

Interest in the relationship between scientific medicine and imperialism has produced a rich body of research, which has only gradually begun to examine more systematically the different ways knowledge systems around the world intersected during the colonial period.38 For many years, the assumption that scientific medicine represented a coherent

in the field in Africa, based on local resources, and then travelled to Europe where it was canonised as authentic and objective. Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory. Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950, Chicago 2011.

36 Mark Harrison, Science and the British Empire, in: Isis 96 (2005) 1, p. 56–63; Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science. Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, New York 2007; William Beinart/Karen Brown/Daniel Gilfoyle, Experts and Expertise in Colonial Africa Reconsidered: Science and the Interpretation of Knowledge, in: African Affairs 108 (2009) 432, p. 413–433; Sujit Sivasundaram, Sciences and the Global. On Methods, Questions, and Theory, in: Isis 101 (2010) 1, p. 146–158; Jürgen Renn (ed.), The Globalization of Knowledge in History, Berlin 2012.

37 David Wade Chambers/Richard Gillespie, Locality in the History of Science. Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge, in: Osiris 15 (2000), p. 221–240; David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago/London 2003; Lissa Roberts, Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation, in: Itinerario 33 (2009) 1, p. 9–27; Helen Tilley, Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies; or, Is the History of Science Ready for the World? in: Isis 101 (2010) 1, p. 110–119; Brett M. Bennett/ Joseph M. Hodge (eds.), Science and Empire. Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800–1970, Basingstoke/New York 2011; Sujit Sivasundaram, Science, Medicine and Technology, in: Philippa Levine/John Marriott (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories, London/New York 2012, p. 549– 566; Martin Lengwiler/Nigel Penn/Patrick Harries (eds.), Science, Africa and Europe. Processing Information and Creating Knowledge, London/New York 2019.

38 Roy MacLeod/Lewis Milton (eds.), Disease, Medicine, and Empire. Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, London 1988; David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester 1988; Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease. A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, body of knowledge and powerful tool of governance obscured the multifaceted and often conflicting interpretations of disease. The encounter between the materialist and universalist worldview of scientific medicine and the complexity of the pre-colonial field of healing in Africa resulted in the application of the label "traditional African medicine" to a highly heterogeneous collection of old and novel concepts and practices. Medical traditions, however, even if invented, are inherently plural, contrary to the persistent unifying ambitions and intentions of scientific medicine.39

The contributions of the Basel Mission doctors to the field of tropical medicine and hygiene highlight the significance of religious actors to the development of the scientific discipline, challenging the hitherto dominant narratives focussing on prominent researchers, specific diseases, academic institutions and national borders.40 In her 2012 study *Networks*

1900–1940, Cambridge/New York 1992; Shula Marks, What Is Colonial about Colonial Medicine? And What Happened to Imperialism and Health? in: Social History of Medicine 10 (1997) 2, p. 205–219; Wolfgang U. Eckart, Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus. Deutschland 1884–1945, Paderborn 1997; Kirk Arden Hoppe, Lords of the Fly. Colonial Visions and Revisions of African Sleeping-Sickness Environments on Ugandan Lake Victoria, 1906–1961, in: Africa 67 (1997) 1, p. 86–105; Robert Debusmann, Krankheit im kolonialen Alltag. Ärztliche Erfahrungen und Patientenverhalten in Kamerun, 1890–1930, in: Hans Peter Hahn (ed.), Afrika und die Globalisierung, Münster 1999, p. 217–225; Myron J. Echenberg, Black Death, White Medicine. Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914–1945, Portsmouth 2002; Margrit Davies, Public Health and Colonialism. The Case of New Guinea, 1884–1914, Wiesbaden 2002; Michael Worboys, Colonial and Imperial Medicine, in: Deborah Brunton (ed.), Medicine Transformed. Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1880–1930, Manchester/New York 2004, p. 211–238; Hiroyuki Isobe, Medizin und Kolonialgesellschaft. Die Bekämpfung der Schlafkrankheit in den deutschen "Schutzgebieten" vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Berlin 2009; Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies and Reverie in Colonial Congo, Durham 2016.

39 Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization and Mobility in the Congo, Durham 1999; Luise White, Speaking with Vampires. Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Berkley 2000; Julie Livingston, Debility and the Modern Imagination in Botswana, Bloomington 2005; Walter Bruchhausen, Medizin zwischen den Welten. Geschichte und Gegenwart des medizinischen Pluralismus im südöstlichen Tansania, Göttingen 2006; Ibid., Medical Pluralism as a Historical Phenomenon: A Regional and Multi-Level Approach to Health Care in German, British and Independent East Africa, in: Anne Digby/Waltraud Ernst/Projit B. Mukharji (eds.), Crossing Colonial Historiographies. Histories of Colonial and Indigenous Medicines in Transnational Perspective, Newcastle 2010, p. 99–113.

40 Gordon Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities Since 1880, London 1978; Michael Worboys, Manson, Ross and Colonial Medical Policy: Tropical Medicine in London and Liverpool, 1899–1914, in: Roy MacLeod/Milton Lewis *in Tropical Medicine*, Deborah J. Neill reassessed the history of tropical medicine by demonstrating that transnational networks were constitutive to the formation of the new medical speciality around 1900, even if they concurred and intersected with international rivalry.41 Most recently, Manuela Bauche and Sarah Ehlers have presented innovative studies on the entanglements of disease control between Africa and Europe, spanning the history of tropical medicine across imperial boundaries.42

The Basel Mission doctors' sources constitute a valuable resource for historians seeking to reconstruct the interactions, exchanges and conflicts between European and African medical knowledge around 1900. In contrast to "imperial tropical medicine," which the historian John Farley characterised as a triad of "definition, imposition and non-involvement," the Basel Mission doctors had an interest in winning the African population over to their cause while heavily relying on the cooperation of local experts, assistants, informants and patients for their medical knowledge production.43 Their evangelising agenda required negotiation skills and linguistic dexterity as well as a degree of sensitivity and flexibility, which is why their sources remain so useful for scholars interested in exchange processes and histories of entanglement during the colonial age.

(eds.), Disease, Medicine, and Empire. Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, London/New York 1988, p. 21–37; David Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine 1500– 1900, Amsterdam/Atlanta 1996; Gordon Charles Cook, Tropical Medicine. An Illustrated History of the Pioneers, Paris/London 2007; Douglas Melvin Haynes, Imperial Medicine. Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease, Philadelphia 2001; Lise Wilkinson/ Anne Hardy, Prevention and Cure: the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. A 20th Century Quest for Global Public Health, London/New York 2001; Nandini Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India, Liverpool 2012; Michael A. Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France, Chicago/London 2014.

41 Deborah J. Neill, Networks in Tropical Medicine. Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890–1930, Stanford 2012. Also see Myriam Mertens/ Guillaume Lachenal, The History of "Belgian" Tropical Medicine from a Cross-Border Perspective, in: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire 90 (2012) 4, p. 1249–1271.

42 Manuela Bauche, Medizin und Herrschaft. Malariabekämpfung in Kamerun, Ostafrika und Ostfriesland 1890–1919, Frankfurt a. M. 2017; Sarah Ehlers, Europa und die Schlafkrankheit. Koloniale Seuchenbekämpfung, europäische Identitäten und moderne Medizin 1890–1950, Göttingen 2019.

43 John Farley, Bilharzia. A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine, Cambridge 1991, p. 293.

#### *1.2.3 Colonial History and Knowledge*

The Basel Mission doctors participated in networks that crossed imperial borders, which highlights that colonial history can never be fully understood in national terms. Recent studies have examined the role of transimperial networks, providing us with a more nuanced understanding of how empires were shaped by missionaries, mercenaries, scientists, families, guilds and other social groups that operated across political boundaries.44 They have prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between centres and peripheries, devaluing the idea of empires as political entities tightly controlled by metropolitan elites. This fresh perspective is also reflected in the growing scholarship on Switzerland's colonial entanglements.45 The hitherto dominant historiography, which has been

44 Benedikt Stutchey (ed.), Science across the European Empires 1800–1950, Oxford 2005; Ulrike Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen. Deutschland und Grossbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika 1880–1914, Frankfurt a. M. 2011; Volker Barth/Roland Cvetkovski (eds.), Imperial Co-Operation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters, London 2015; Tanja Bührer/Flavio Eichmann/Stig Förster/Benedikt Stuchtey (eds), Cooperation and Empire. Local Realities of Global Processes, New York/Oxford 2017; Bernhard C. Schär, Introduction. The Dutch East Indies and Europe, ca. 1800–1930. An Empire of Demands and Opportunities, in: BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 134 (2019) 3, p. 4–20; Ibid., From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900, in: The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48 (2020) 2, p. 230–262, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1638620; Moritz von Brescius, German Science in the Age of Empire. Enterprise, Opportunity and the Schlagintweit Brothers, Cambridge 2019.

45 Andreas Zangger, Koloniale Schweiz. Ein Stück Globalgeschichte zwischen Europa und Südostasien (1860–1930), Bielefeld 2011; Patricia Purtschert/Barbara Lüthi/ Francesca Falk (eds.), Postkoloniale Schweiz. Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien, Bielefeld 2012; Lukas Zürcher, Die Schweiz in Ruanda: Mission, Entwicklungshilfe und nationale Selbstbestätigung (1900–1975), Zürich 2014; Christof Dejung, Jenseits der Exzentrik. Aussereuropäische Geschichte in der Schweiz. Einleitung zum Themenschwerpunkt, in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 64 (2014) 2, p. 195– 209; Patricia Purtschert/Harald Fischer-Tiné (eds.), Colonial Switzerland. Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins, Basingstoke 2015; Bernhard C. Schär, Tropenliebe. Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900, Frankfurt a. M./New York 2015; Patricia Purtschert/Francesca Falk/Barbara Lüthi, Switzerland and 'Colonialism without Colonies'. Reflections on the Status of Colonial Outsiders, in: Interventions 18 (2016) 2, p. 286–302; Barbara Lüthi/Francesca Falk/ Patricia Purtschert, Colonialism without Colonies: Examining Blank Spaces in Colonial Studies, in: National Identities 18 (2016) 1, p. 1–9; Pierre Eichenberger/Thomas David/ Lea Haller/Matthieu Leimgruber/Bernhard C. Schär/Christa Wirth, Beyond Switzerland. Reframing the Swiss Historical Narrative in Light of Transnational History, in: Traverse devoted to a predominantly national narrative and largely ignored colonialism and migration as formative forces of Swiss history, is facing headwinds.46

The Basel Mission stood at the heart of transregional networks, maintained mission stations in British and German colonies, such as the Gold Coast and Cameroon, and acted as a knowledge broker across the imperial world, adding to the ongoing debates about Switzerland's colonial involvements. By producing and propagating knowledge of hygiene, the Basel Mission doctors created lasting views and practices of purity, health and cleanliness that affected not only the colonies but also the very conception of Europe itself.47 Influenced by anthropology, literary and cultural studies, scholars have analysed knowledge as a central feature of colonialism for over four decades.48 An ever growing body of colonial knowledge, including texts, photographs and objects, provided people in nineteenth-century Europe with a unique foil on which to draw up and contrast images of the colonial other and themselves.49

(2017) 1, p. 137–152; Patricia Purtschert, Kolonialität und Geschlecht im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Geschichte der weissen Schweiz, Bielefeld 2019; Simone Bleuer/Barbara Miller, Verkörpern—verfestigen—verflechten. Resonanz missionarischer Kulturkontakte in der katholischen Schweiz der 1950er- und 1960er-Jahre, in: Traverse (2019) 1, p. 94–108.

46 On migration as a constitutive factor of Swiss history, see Francesca Falk, Gender Innovation and Migration in Switzerland, Cham 2018; André Holenstein/Patrick Kury/ Kristina Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, Baden 2018; Barbara Lüthi/Damir Skenderovic (eds.), Switzerland and Migration. Historical and Current Perspectives on a Changing Landscape, Cham 2019.

47 Recent studies on the impact of European colonialism on the making of Europe itself include Wolfgang Reinhard, Die Unterwerfung der Welt: Globalgeschichte der europäischen Expansion 1415–2015, München 2016; Christof Dejung/Martin Lengwiler (eds.), Ränder der Moderne. Neue Perspektiven auf die Europäische Geschichte (1800–1930), Köln/Weimar/Wien 2016.

48 The classic studies include Edward Said, Orientalism, New York 1978; Ronald Inden, Imagining India, Oxford 1990; Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton 1996; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton 2001.

49 For Switzerland, see Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians; Patrick Minder, La Suisse coloniale. Les représentations de l'Afrique et des Africains en Suisse au temps des colonies (1880–1939), Berne 2011; Bernhard C. Schär, Bauern und Hirten *reconsidered.* Umrisse der "erfundenen" Schweiz im imperialen Raum, in: Patricia Purtschert/Barbara Lüthi/ Francesca Falk (eds.), Postkoloniale Schweiz. Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien, Bielefeld 2012, p. 315–331. For Germany, Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870, Durham

Recent years have seen the emergence of a lively debate over the nature of colonial knowledge. Critics have pointed out that the notion of colonial knowledge is a problematic one, since it bundles together a range of highly diverse historical actors, places and moments in which knowledge emerged that were not linked to colonial rule or not intended to produce knowledge for imperial objectives. In a broad and critical sense, however, colonial knowledge is not merely knowledge produced to serve concrete colonial aims, but the ensemble of those European bodies of knowledge that dealt with the non-European world and could therefore not elude the internal logic and hegemonic discourses of the colonial period.50

In his 2014 publication *Entanglements of Empire*, Tony Ballantyne showed that British missionaries were pivotal in entangling the M¯aori in the webs of empire despite their objection to formal colonisation. They produced knowledge about the conditions on the ground, denouncing the physical suffering inflicted by Europeans on the M¯aori, which ultimately provided a powerful rationale for the British colonisation of New Zealand, portrayed as an act of protection.51 The knowledge produced by missionaries, as well-intended or not as it might have been, was part of a growing body of knowledge, which implicitly or explicitly assumed the inherent superiority of Christian religion and European civilisation. While they did not necessarily support colonial rule or imperial domination, they were inevitably interwoven in uneven, hierarchical power relations between imperial Europe and the colonial world.

1997; Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, Frankfurt a. M./ Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit, Stuttgart 2004; Wolfgang Struck, Die Eroberung der Phantasie. Kolonialismus, Literatur und Film zwischen deutschem Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik, Göttingen 2010; Dirk van Laak, Die deutsche Kolonialgeschichte als Fantasiegeschichte, in: Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst/Joachim Zeller (eds.), Deutschland postkolonial? Die Gegenwart der imperialen Vergangenheit, Berlin 2018, p. 123–142. For the British Empire, Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire. A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York 2000; Ibid., Civilising Subjects. Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867, Chicago 2002; Ibid./Sonya O. Rose (eds.), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge 2006.

50 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley 2005; Tony Ballantyne, Colonial Knowledge, in: Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire. Themes and Perspectives, Malden 2008, p. 177–198.

51 Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire.

Postcolonial scholarship has emphasised the long-term impact of colonial knowledge on categories of analysis and academic concepts, and offered innovative ways of eluding Eurocentric perspectives in historical writing.52 At the same time, the idea that colonial knowledge was a homogenous, omnipotent force suggests that sources in colonial archives are useless to critical histories of colonialism, since they only contain European preconceptions and misrepresentations. Colonial knowledge, however, emerged from situated bodily encounters that were unforeseen and unpredictable, and thus conceals considerable complexity.53

Colonialism must be examined as a decidedly fractured phenomenon, which left considerable space for anxiety, subversion and vulnerability. Despite the centrality of knowledge to colonialism, there was no straightforward correlation between knowledge and power. Much of the historiography of colonialism "has taken the categories of 'colonizer' and 'colonized' as givens, rather than as constructions that need to be explained," as Ann Laura Stoler observed.54 It is necessary, therefore, as Sujit Sivasundaram emphasised, "to think beyond categories of colonized and colonial and to fragment traditions of knowledge on all sides."55 To expose colonial archives as sites of contested knowledge, Stoler has proposed the method of reading along the archival grain, rather than

52 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton 2000; Ann Laura Stoler/Frederick Cooper, Beetween Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda, in: ibid. (eds.), Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in the Bourgeois World, Berkeley et al. 1997, p. 1–56; Sebastian Conrad/ Shalini Randeria, Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten—Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt, in: ibid./Regina Römhild (eds.), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, 2nd ed., Frankfurt a. M./New York 2013, p. 32–70.

53 Ricardo Roque/Kim A. Wagner (eds.), Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Reading European Archives in World History, Basingstoke/New York 2012; Klaus Hock/Gesa Mackenthun (eds.), Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference, Münster et al. 2012; Rebekka Habermas/Alexandra Przyrembel (eds.), Von Käfern, Märkten und Menschen. Kolonialismus und Wissen in der Moderne, Göttingen 2013; Harald Fischer-Tiné, Pidgin Knowledge. Wissen und Kolonialismus, Zürich 2013; Sebastian Dorsch, Translokale Wissensakteure: Ein Debattenvorschlag zu Wissens- und Globalgeschichtsschreibung, in: Zeiteschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 64 (2016) 9, p. 778–795.

54 Ann Laura Stoler, Cultivating Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves, in: Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire. A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York 2000, p. 87–119, here p. 89.

55 Sivasundaram, Sciences and the Global, p. 155.

simply against it. There is no grand narrative to explain the nature of colonialism, and scholars who make that assumption, according to Stoler, ignore the true nature of the archival record. We must therefore work with rather than against the contents of colonial accounts.56

This study adds to this strand of research by analysing the construction and conflictual relationship between different spaces of knowledge. The Basel missionaries not only closely examined non-European knowledge systems and crucially relied on intermediaries in their quest for evangelisation, but were also brokers of knowledge in many directions. The disparate knowledge they produced makes it possible to think beyond dichotomous colonial categories and reveals that colonialism was a highly fragile and contradictory project. A core concern of this book, therefore, is to examine the multi-layered and varied ways in which the Basel Mission doctors and their contributions to the making of hygiene supported, justified and at times challenged the colonial project.

For many years, historians focused on the question of how Christianity offered justification for imperial expansion and to what extent missionaries served as promoters of colonialism. It is clear by now that the role of missions, and religion more generally, in supporting the colonial project cannot be reduced to mere ideological justification or pragmatic collaboration. Numerous studies demonstrated the complex entanglements between missions and colonialism around the world but these detailed accounts also highlight the need for synthesising approaches. Hygiene offers one such synthesising approach to the colonial period, allowing one to scrutinise how religious, scientific and colonial spaces of knowledge interacted with one another.

### 1.3 Research Aims and Methodological Reflections

The aim of this study is to extend the history of nineteenth-century hygiene: firstly, beyond scientific and secular narratives by showing that religious stakeholders crucially participated in producing and promoting hygienic knowledge between 1885 and 1914; and secondly, by analysing how hygiene was shaped by colonial entanglements. The Basel Mission

56 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton 2009.

doctors form a stimulating point of entry to examine these different layers of hygiene. They were socialised in European societies in which hygiene had become a crucial dimension of private and public life by the late nineteenth century. More precisely, the Basel Mission doctors were Pietist missionaries, who had completed a five-year course in the mission seminary in Basel. They held firm religious views about purity and the body, which were rooted in biblical narratives about sin and disease.

In addition to their missionary training, the Basel Mission doctors also qualified as physicians at European universities with renowned teachers, such as Max von Pettenkofer, Robert Koch and Rudolf Virchow. They moved in transnational academic circles and participated in the scientific debates of the time, dealing for instance with what many scientists of the period saw as the all-important problem of European acclimatisation the viability and functioning of the "white race" in the tropics. The Basel Mission doctors became recognised experts, most notably in the field of tropical medicine and hygiene, which emerged as an institutionalised discipline around 1900.

The formation of a medical speciality devoted to health conditions in tropical colonies exclusively highlights that the age of hygiene was also the age of High Imperialism. Metropolitan policy-makers attached more and more importance to the physical value of their colonial subjects and recognised that medical missions presented a valuable resource for the implementation of hygienic norms in tropical colonies.57 The tropics provided a setting in which the Basel Mission doctors not only gained scientific reputation but also political authority. Their studies on hygiene produced colonial knowledge, which served European imperial interests in Africa on the one hand, and shaped the colonial imagination of Africa on the other. At the same time, their position as authorities on tropical hygiene indicates that hygienic knowledge around 1900 was infused with pious notions of purity.

How did the Basel Mission doctors generate, systematise and disseminate knowledge on hygiene between West Africa and Europe from

57 On the meaning of the body in colonial contexts, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1993; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York 1995; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 2002; Tony Ballantyne/Antoinette Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact. Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Durham 2005.

1885 to 1914? Their knowledge emerged in protracted and contentious exchange processes on the ground in the specific locations in which they lived. This study goes beyond these local production contexts, however, by investigating how these situated negotiations of hygiene circulated and influenced religious, scientific and colonial bodies of knowledge.58 Hygiene was not only a relational discourse of difference that intersected with other discourses of difference on gender, race and class but also a structuring concept of difference that produced inequality. It thus offers a vantage point from which to question the development of these intersecting colonial concepts of difference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

### *1.3.1 Spaces of Knowledge*

This study traces various meanings of hygiene emerging over the nineteenth century and their reciprocal interactions between 1885 and 1914. Spaces of knowledge offer an analytical lens through which to examine the interactive and contested nature of knowledge and allow us to analyse how different discourses and practices of hygiene overlapped, differed and influenced each other. The Basel Mission doctors participated in the making of hygiene in a number of ways. It is necessary, therefore, to dissect this amalgam. The concept of spaces of knowledge makes it possible to identify competing epistemologies and to examine how people navigated between multiple systems of knowledge. A basic assumption thereby is that the Basel Mission doctors themselves contributed to the construction, consolidation and perpetuation of these spaces of knowledge, thereby stabilising the illusion of separate spheres.

The book is structured around three distinct, yet interwoven, spaces of knowledge, in which the Basel Mission doctors and their knowledge of hygiene played a pivotal role. Spaces of knowledge describe the appearance of social and cognitive structures between actors, institutions and networks. They contain worlds of meanings by which humans come to understand and make sense of the world. Spaces of knowledge transport assumptions, norms and values but also constantly generate new stories,

58 Helen Tilley has argued that the circulation of knowledge between different localities was more relevant than the context of origin, since European and African forms of knowledge often only loosely interacted and co-existed in incommensurable fields. Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory.

meanings and connections. Knowledge is conceived here as a cognitive and social process, which transforms information and data into discourses and practices and thus enables individuals, institutions and whole societies to act and plan ahead. This includes academic and scientific knowledge but also various forms of public and popular knowledge, which circulates within and between spaces of knowledge.

Spaces of knowledge are characterised by hierarchical and hegemonial aspirations as well as collective and individual negotiation processes that determine which information is integrated, adapted or disqualified from the dominant body of knowledge. People contributing to a space of knowledge design certain criteria, categories and principles to generate and order their body of thought. Yet different actors possess more or less power in a specific space of knowledge depending on their position and reputation as laypeople, informants or experts, which influences whether their opinions are accepted as knowledge. The same people, such as the Basel Mission doctors, adopt different roles in different spaces of knowledge depending on whether they are complying with the according epistemology, modes of expression and models of truth.

Spaces of knowledge are dynamic and have a porous but tangible external border. Although one space may dominate, many spaces can and do exist simultaneously. There are personal, institutional and thematic overlaps between them, which create in-between spaces and border areas. Mobility between them, however, should not be stressed to the extent that immobility, disjuncture and ignorance are forgotten. Actors, institutions and networks from the religious, scientific and colonial spaces of knowledge interacted more or less between 1885 and 1914, and thus changed the substance of hygiene. The knowledge resulting from this interplay shaped conceptions of the colonial other and triggered the reordering of various bodies of knowledge and identities in European societies.

The Basel Mission doctors, and their influence on hygienic knowledge around 1900, are evidence that there were no insurmountable boundaries between religious, scientific and political domains of society. Au contraire, their sources reveal that hygiene absorbed highly diverse meanings of spiritual purity, physical health and civilisational cleanliness. To use a term coined by Bruno Latour, "practices of purification"—describing processes of secularisation and differentiation—have obscured the common origin as well as the ensuing convergences and mutual influences between religious, scientific and colonial knowledge.59 On a methodological level, however, spaces of knowledge prove highly useful to disentangle this complexity and reconstruct the diverging forces that came together in the making of hygiene around 1900.

### *1.3.2 Source Material*

The Basel Mission doctors left a rich and diverse body of sources ranging from scientific treatises and medical guidebooks to devotional writings and popular travelogues. The core of the source material consists of reports, private letters, journal articles and monographs written from 1885, when the first Basel Mission doctor Rudolf Fisch arrived on the Gold Coast, to 1914, when the Basel Mission was forced to interrupt their operations in West Africa due to the outbreak of the First World War. This period of research opens up a unique historical configuration, which stimulated the creation and circulation of hygienic knowledge. By focusing on six main protagonists and adopting a transregional perspective, this study hopes to break through the seemingly abstract process of knowledge production and do justice to the individuals and localities, in which hygienic knowledge emerged.

Hygiene was interactive and contested knowledge. Various forms of bodily knowledge on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon, Christian beliefs, scientific concepts and colonial views differed and partly contradicted each other. The bulk of published source material, however, conceals this complexity because it was composed and ordered for European readers, revealing very different ends of knowledge-making abroad and at home. The reports, studies and letters written by the Basel missionaries in West Africa were condensed, edited and substantially reworked, as editors of missionary magazines, scientific journals and colonial periodicals prepared texts with the expectations and sensibilities of their metropolitan readers in mind. Not surprisingly, the routine trials and anxieties of life in tropical colonies or the uncertain self-reflections rarely made it into publications designed to educate, entertain and solicit funds and support.

One of this book's major challenges thus consists of breaking through superficial narratives and exposing the multiple interactions that created

59 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge MA 1993.

the bodies of knowledge accredited to the Basel Mission doctors. This study addresses this challenge in four ways. Firstly, the comprehensive written records are examined in a way that exposes their porousness. The Basel Mission doctors utilised a wide range of literary genres to reach out to different readers from evangelical circles and colonial enthusiasts to scientific communities. They adapted their cognitive models, strategies of persuasion and plausibility procedures, in order to position themselves as experts in the respective space of knowledge. Their written sources, therefore, are not consistent, which provides a methodological entry point to contrast differing accounts and expose the social interactions behind the fashioning of hygienic knowledge.

The Basel Mission archives hold a significant number of confidential reports, personal letters and diaries that contain intimate and revealing details. Of course, these documents are still authored from a European point of view, including a sense of inherent superiority, but they do not speak in just one single voice. They are multivocal, fractured and contradictory, and thus call into question the prevailing canon of knowledge. Testimonies written by missionaries are products of prolonged and personal exchanges with the resident population in specific regions of the colonial world, and thus differ sharply from the majority of sources composed by colonial officials, traders and scientists. They thus offer a promising starting point to question established historical master narratives.60

Secondly, this study illuminates how Africans, women and other hidden contributors dialogically shaped missionary texts, images and collections. The Basel Mission doctors' stories are impossible to understand without considering the open and silent protest but also the cooperation and support of the inhabitants in the places they called home in West Africa. In the end, it was Africans' desire for contact with Europeans, their interest in agriculture, literacy, medicine and technology, and the support of certain rulers that enabled the foundation of mission stations. Regional authorities, medical assistants, translators and teachers enabled the Basel Mission to gain and broaden their influence on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon. It is crucial therefore to visualise these exchange processes,

60 Kirsten Rüther, Through the Eyes of Missionaries and the Archives They Created: The Interwoven Histories of Power and Authority in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal, in: Journal of Southern African Studies, 38 (2012) 2, p. 369–384, here p. 384.

mostly hidden between the lines, without simultaneously neglecting the existing power disparities in the production of knowledge.

By examining developments in parts of West Africa and the Alemannic region in the same analytical framework, this book offers an entangled and dialectic history of hygiene. It is clear, however, that an asymmetrical body of sources complicates this undertaking. While we have access to plenty of source material in Basel, we are confronted with very few direct sources from the communities in West Africa. Scholars have shown, however, that it is possible through critical reading of colonial sources to retrieve the voices of people from whom we mostly lack text sources.61 When historians take into account protagonists who commonly did not leave written testimonies, such as Africans, women and people from the lower social strata, as active shapers of social interactions and historical sources, they can no longer write them out of the history of these entanglements or simply reduce them to being objects of colonial discourse.

Thirdly, the practicality and materiality of hygienic knowledge offers an effective method to fragment simplifying assumptions. Hygiene was always more than a unified discourse, it was a heterogeneous practice that had to be put to everyday use by African parishioners, missionary wives, city missionaries, maids, porters, school children, medical assistants, abstainers, travellers, traders, colonial officials and many more both abroad and at home.62 The rich non-written body of sources in the Basel Mission archives highlights that hygiene cannot be reduced to deconstructionist language games and provides an opportunity to trace the material entanglements between West Africa and Europe. Photographs, commodities and objects testify to the lasting and close exchanges between the Basel Mission doctors and the people with whom they lived and worked.

61 Ann Laura Stoler, "In Cold Blood": Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives, in: Representations 37 (1992), p. 151–189; Ibid., Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance, in: Archival Science 2 (2002), p. 87–109; Sivasundaram, Sciences and the Global; Ricardo Roque/Kim A. Wagner, Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge, in: ibid. (eds.), Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Reading European Archives in World History, Basingstoke/New York 2012, p. 1–32; Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire; Schär, Tropenliebe.

62 On the historiography of writing about everyday life in African history and beyond, see Andreas Eckert/Adam Jones, Introduction: Historical Writing about Everyday Life, in: Journal of African Cultural Studies 15 (2002) 1, p. 5–16.

Fourthly, this study contrasts the source material in the Basel Mission archives with additional evangelical, scientific and colonial collections and publications. These holdings make it possible to reconstruct the different spaces of knowledge in which the mission doctors operated and add an important external perspective to question their influence. Their knowledge has to be contextualised in order to understand the particularity of their contributions and to assess what impact they had on the formation of hygiene. This approach not only discloses alliances, interdependencies and rivalries between different individuals, groups and institutions but also highlights correlations and tensions between developments abroad and at home. When consulting various archives, it becomes clear that knowledge about hygiene around 1900 was rife with contradictions and inconsistencies.

### *1.3.3 Structure of the Book*

This book is divided into three main parts. The first one starts by reconstructing the broader social frameworks and historical contexts in which the Basel Mission doctors were socialised to gain an understanding of the nature of their knowledge of hygiene before they moved overseas. Their sources contain many blind spots, covering the significant participation of women and children for example, which is why it is particularly important to examine the communities of origin and historical circumstances in which the Basel Mission emerged. This perspective prevents a simplifying juxtaposition between the Basel Mission doctors as uprooted global protagonists and the seemingly immobile local actors in West Africa. Once we have turned the historical gaze onto the mental and material world of the Basel Mission doctors at home, we are better equipped to deal with their perceptions of Africa.

The first part contains three chapters that trace the formation of the religious, scientific and colonial spaces of knowledge respectively and examine how knowledge of purity, health and cleanliness evolved over the nineteenth century. The focus on the Basel Mission doctors shows that hygiene had the capacity to absorb multiple layers of meaning. Hygiene held an interdiscursive capacity around 1900, meaning it had the ability to connect different discursive fields. It stood at the centre of a vast semantic field of notions such as purity, health and cleanliness, and their opposites: impurity, disease and filth. Very different moral leaders including religious protagonists, social reformers, medical scientists and colonial masterminds used hygiene narratives to promote their own concepts of order, create distinct notions of normality and assert a shared, yet delimited, identity. The making of hygiene between 1885 and 1914 cannot be understood without a detailed map of prior meanings.

The second part includes three chapters that focus on negotiations of purity, health and cleanliness on the alleged margins of hygiene in West Africa from 1885 to 1914. These chapters analyse how the Basel Mission doctors resorted to hygiene in their mission in West Africa, highlighting that in order to be effective, their knowledge needed to be constantly reframed and amended to the conditions on the ground. Their encounters with people in West Africa were dynamic, yet conflictual, processes of mutual entanglement, which included both appropriation and rejection. This part reveals misunderstandings, controversies and trade-offs within the missionary community and the resident population as well as between them. Crucially, it shows that the hygiene mission in West Africa was not about the transfer of knowledge from Europe to Africa but about the very creation of hygiene on the supposed periphery of civilisation.

The third part comprises three chapters that explore how the knowledge of hygiene emerging from these complex interactions reverberated and affected religious, scientific and colonial debates and practices between 1885 and 1914. The obsession with hygiene in the tropics correlated with a fundamental change of attitudes towards hygiene in late nineteenth-century Europe. How did trials of purity, health and cleanliness in West Africa alter or endorse existing assumptions about hygiene? Hygiene not only produced lasting perceptions about race, gender and class but also had profound practical and material consequences for people around the world. What impact did the Basel Mission doctors and their transregional negotiations of hygiene have on scientific theories, segregation policies, bodily practices, commodity culture, social interactions, political developments, cultural norms, religious values and colonial identities both abroad and at home?

### References

Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines, Durham/London 2006.

David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester 1988.

"Sei Sauber…!" Eine Geschichte der Hygiene und der öffentlichen Gesundheitsvorsorge in Europa, ed. by Musée d'Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg, Köln 2004, p. 204–217.

Lukas Zürcher, Die Schweiz in Ruanda: Mission, Entwicklungshilfe und nationale Selbstbestätigung (1900–1975), Zürich 2014.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## Spaces of Knowledge and Meanings of Hygiene in the Nineteenth Century

## The Religious Space of Knowledge: The Basel Mission, Worldwide Webs and Pietist Purity

### 2.1 Pietists, Patricians and the Social Question in Basel

The religious space of knowledge, in which the Basel Mission doctors were socialised, was rooted in the tradition of Pietism, which, alongside Anglo-American puritanism, formed the most significant Protestant revival since the Reformation. Pietists believed in the necessity of a spiritual rebirth and intense Bible-study as well as bodily asceticism and discipline. They strongly supported education and literacy, and focused on the individual's emotional connection with God. At the same time, Pietism brought people together in circles that not only became places of mutual edification but also initiated social change. Founded in the wake of the so-called *Erweckung*—the early nineteenth-century evangelical awakening on the European continent—the Basel Mission drew upon the support of wealthy and powerful bourgeois families from Basel and far-flung Pietist networks reaching across Europe and beyond.1

1 For an overview of the scholarship on the *Erweckung*, see Andrew Kloes, The German Awakening: Protestant Renewal after the Enlightenment, 1815–1848, Oxford 2020.

© The Author(s) 2023 L. M. Ratschiller Nasim, *Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885–1914*, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27128-1\_2

49

### *2.1.1 Wurttemberg Pietism*

Pietism was a significant religious movement within Protestantism that emerged at the end of the seventeenth century and reached full blossom in the eighteenth century. Pietists called for an end to denominational strife and promoted a practical form of Christianity marked by personal piety, programmes for social betterment and efforts to spread Christ's Kingdom on earth. Originating in present-day Germany, Pietism had a lasting impact on Protestantism worldwide, particularly in Europe and North America. Far from being a homogenous movement however, Pietism changed considerably over time and adopted different forms according to regional, structural and political conditions.2 The version of Pietism that was most influential in Basel and the Alemannic-speaking areas of Germany and Switzerland around 1800 is called "Wurttemberg Pietism," after the region where it originated.3

Wurttemberg was a Duchy in southwest Germany until it was enlarged and raised to the status of a Kingdom in a loose German Confederation during the Napoleonic period. Pietists often found themselves at the heart of controversies with governments whose authority they challenged. Therefore, they constantly had to look for places where they could practise their faith without persecution. In 1743, the Government of Wurttemberg passed the "Pietist Rescript," a law which guaranteed Pietists freedom from persecution if they stayed within certain limits. The Pietist population subsequently grew in Wurttemberg and became very influential in the life of the Protestant community there. In 1871,

2 Martin Brecht/Klaus Deppermann/Ulrich Gäbler/Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus, 4 vol., Göttingen 1993–2004; Hartmut Lehmann, Engerer, weiterer und erweiterter Pietismusbegriff, in: Pietismus und Neuzeit 29 (2003), p. 18– 37; Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe, Baltimore 2013; Christian T. Collins Winn et al. (eds.), The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, Eugene 2011; Justin A. Davis, Pietism and the Foundations of the Modern World, Eugene 2019.

3 Wurttemberg Pietism is well documented. See Ulrike Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit, Göttingen 2005; Andreas Gestrich, Pietismus und ländliche Frömmigkeit in Württemberg im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, in: Norbert Haag/Sabine Holtz/Wolfgang Zimmermann/Dieter R. Bauer (eds.), Ländliche Frömmigkeit. Konfessionskulturen und Lebenswelten, Stuttgart 2002, p. 343–357; Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart 1969.

Wurttemberg joined the new and more strongly unified German Empire, headed by the Kaiser and King of Prussia Otto von Bismarck.4

The city of Basel became a focal point of Wurttemberg Pietism and the subsequent transnational missionary movement that arose from the religious revival in both European and American churches in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 The main focus of this renewal lay in the creation of a more practical and active approach to Christianity, including evangelising and welfare work both abroad and at home.6 Pietists felt that the epochal political conflicts following the French Revolution and the subsequent economic and social transformations had led to the disintegration of traditional communities. They interpreted these changes as signs of de-Christianisation and thus the approaching end of the world, the second coming of Christ and the imminent establishment of the Kingdom of God. This perception energised the missionary movement, which promised to expand God's Kingdom by human effort.7

Although the connections between Pietism and the nineteenthcentury evangelical awakening within German-speaking Protestantism are discussed controversially in research, most historians agree that they shared a focus on personal belief and subjective religious experience.8

4 Wurttemberg had a population of 1.3 million in 1812, rising to about 2 million by the end of the century. See Jenkins, Württemberg als Hauptsäule der historischen Basler Mission.

5 Erika Hebeisen, Leidenschaftlich fromm. Die pietistische Bewegung in Basel 1750– 1830, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2005; Thomas K. Kuhn/Martin Sallmann (eds.), Das "fromme Basel". Religion in einer Stadt des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 2002.

6 Karl Rennstich, Mission—Geschichte der protestantischen Mission in Deutschland, in: Ulrich Gäbler (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 3: Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2000, p. 308–319; Lucian Hölscher, Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit in Deutschland, München 2005, p. 347–351.

7 Judith Becker, Zukunftserwartungen und Missionsimpetus bei Missionsgesellschaften in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Wolfgang Breul/Jan Carsten Schnurr (eds.), Geschichtsbewusstsein und Zukunftserwartungen in Pietismus und Erweckungsbewegung, Göttingen 2013, p. 244–270; Ibid., "Gehet hin in alle Welt…". Sendungsbewusstsein in der evangelischen Missionsbewegung der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Evangelische Theologie 72 (2012) 2, p. 134–154.

8 Thomas K. Kuhn/Veronika Albrecht-Birkner (eds.), Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne: Erweckungsbewegungen als historiographische Herausforderung, Berlin 2017; Gustav Adolf Benrath, Die Erweckung innerhalb der deutschen Landeskirchen, in: Ulrich Gäbler (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 3: Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2000, p. 150–271.

The *Erweckung* transformed Christian mission from being a concern of rulers and church leaders to an initiative to be supported and upheld by every committed Christian. Born-again laypeople, many of them women, became agents of their own spirituality, meeting in non-church settings to pray, read and discuss the Bible, and to encourage each another in their faith. Tract and missionary societies emerged, which had no organic connection with a specific church and set out to enlist backing from congregations elsewhere, regardless of territorial church jurisdictions.9

Inspired by English writers of religious tracts, a group of Protestants from Basel's surrounding area adopted the renewed interest in the Bible and the missionary cause.10 The indifference of Pietism towards confessional tenets facilitated coalitions between different denominations and allowed for Swabian Lutherans and Swiss Calvinists to take Christian action together. In 1780, they founded the "German Society for the Promotion of Pure Instruction and True Piety" in Basel, commonly referred to as the *Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft*—German Society for Christianity. The Bible study and discussion group brought together prominent clergymen, politicians, business owners and theologians from the Alemannic region, who identified themselves with the Pietist movement and wanted to establish visible, outward expression of their religious beliefs.11

The society's primary objectives were to build networks with other evangelical groups across Europe and to disseminate Christian literature. From about 1800, the *Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft* started publishing German translations of reports, tracts and other publications produced by the burgeoning British missionary societies, such as the Baptist Missionary Society. Due to the increasingly strong missionary

9 By 1800, the Kingdom of Wurttemberg alone counted more than fifty of these voluntary societies.

10 On the renewed interest in the Bible in Basel, see Hans Hauzenberger, Basel und die Bibel. Die Bibel als Quelle ökumenischer, missionarischer, sozialer und pädagogischer Impulse in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 1996.

11 Martin Brecht/Friedrich de Boor/Klaus Deppermann/Harmut Lehmann/Andreas Lindt/Johannes Wallmann (eds.), Die Basler Christentumsgesellschaft, Göttingen 1982.

element in their thinking, members of the *Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft* initiated a seminary for the education of overseas evangelists in Basel in 1815.12

#### *2.1.2 The Basel Patricians*

The inception of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in 1815 drew on long-standing religious, commercial and political networks rooted in the city on the Rhine. Located in the heartland of an interregional triangle between Switzerland, Alsace and the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, Basel was home to one of the few ancient bridges across the Rhine, which made it an economic hub long before its industries had fully matured. The ruling elite, the patricians, not only fostered important trade ties across Europe but also paid special attention to religious issues.13 They organised their own Reformation in 1529 and displayed particular sympathy for revivalist movements such as Pietism and the evangelical awakening over the next centuries. These Protestant merchants and manufacturers, who dominated politics in the city-state well into twentieth century, provided the necessary financial, organisational and political support for the establishment of a mission society in Basel.14

From the late seventeenth century, the patricians occupied most political offices and regularly sent representatives from their ranks to the so-called *Tagsatzung*—the Federal Diet of Switzerland.15 Growing

12 Horst Weigelt, Die Diasporaarbeit der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Wirksamkeit der Deutschen Christentumsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Ulrich Gäbler (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 3: Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2000, p. 113–148.

13 On the term "patrician" in the Basel context, see Schär, Tropenliebe, p. 42; Philipp Sarasin, Stadt der Bürger. Bürgerliche Macht und städtische Gesellschaft, Basel 1846– 1914, Göttingen 1997, p. 13. For a critical view on the use of the term, see Sara Janner, Zwischen Machtanspruch und Autoritätsverlust. Zur Funktion von Religion und Kirchlichkeit in Politik und Selbstverständnis des konservativen alten Bürgertums im Basel des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 2012, p. 30–31.

14 Basel's upper class was composed of old as well as new money generated by global trade and industries such as silk, cotton and tobacco.

15 This legislative and executive council of the Swiss Confederacy was a meeting of delegates of the individual cantons and existed in various forms since the beginnings of Swiss independence until the formation of the Swiss Federal State in 1848. See Andreas Würgler, Die Tagsatzung der Eidgenossen: Politik, Kommunikation und Symbolik einer repräsentativen Institution im europäischen Kontext, Epfendorf 2010.

religious and political conflicts between liberal and conservative forces dominated Swiss society from the late eighteenth century, as was the case across Europe. The end of the Old Confederacy began with the invasion of Napoleon's troops in Basel in 1798. The cantons subsequently experienced a temporary loss of their independence and the Napoleonic wars threatened more than once to engulf the city on the Rhine.16

Basel, the largest and wealthiest town in German-speaking Switzerland at this time, had become a byword for political conservatism by the 1830s. Alone among the major Protestant cantons, it withstood the Revolution of 1830 and resisted the liberalisation of the *Ratsherrenregiment*—the rule of the merchant elite. Increasing tensions between the relatively disenfranchised countryside surrounding Basel and the urban elite led to a short civil war and the separation of the territory into two new half-cantons in 1833, *Basel-Stadt* and *Basel-Landschaft.* The patricians subsequently had to concede their territory south of the city, where their silk ribbon factories and summer residences stood. The split of the canton of Basel also meant that the patricians lost considerable influence in the Confederacy and steadily alienated themselves from federal matters.17

The liberal forces dominating the majority of the other cantons had supported the insurgency against the conservative elite in Basel. The city's wealth and independence, together with its orientation to the outside world, had long made it an object of envy and resentment among the other cantons. On the other side, most voices in the city of Basel opposed liberal centralisation plans, such as the proposed transformation of Switzerland from a *Staatenbund*, a confederation of states, into a *Bundesstaat*, a federal state. Basel remained loyal to the Confederation during the civil war of 1847 but there were many patricians who sympathised with the conservative cause of maximum cantonal independence. The *Bundesverfassung—*Federal Constitution—of 1848 was passed

16 Matthias Manz, Basel. Von der Helvetik bis zur Kantonstrennung (1798–1833), in: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007387/2016-01-13/#HVonderHelvetikbiszur Kantonstrennung 28 17 98–183,329, version 13.01.2016 (last access: 22.07.2022).

17 Claudia Opitz, Von der Aufklärung zur Kantonstrennung, in: Georg Kreis/Beat von Wartburg (eds.), Basel. Geschichte einer städtischen Gesellschaft, Basel 2000, p. 150–185. in Basel in a similar grudging spirit with many *Ratsherren* simply not voting.18

The foundation of the Swiss Federal State in 1848 led to the implementation of political reforms. The new Federal Constitution was based on the democratic participation of all men, yet without fundamentally affecting the sovereignty of the cantons. Basel thus remained a citystate ruled by Patrician councilmen, who held exclusive decision-making authority over municipal and religious matters, despite the development of a more democratic Swiss Federal State. They dominated the economic life of the region, controlled the government of the canton and held leading positions in the local churches.19

Religion and politics were closely linked in the city on the Rhine. Most Basel patricians were devout Protestants who believed in liberal trade and business but supported conservative values and policies. This combination of worldly activism, energetic pursuit of trade and profit, devotion to political conservatism and the religious piety that dominated the city gave observers the impression of an oppressively pious, duplicitous society.20 For a long time, patrician families could be certain of their influence in both the political and religious domain. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did religious as well as political liberalism gain momentum. A new church constitution was passed in 1874 guaranteeing the Protestant cantonal church more independence from the city-state, and 1875 saw the adoption of a liberal cantonal constitution based on the model of other cantons.21

For many patricians, while the cantonal separation of 1833 had been a life changing and humiliating experience, it had also served as a wake-up call to redefine their place in the world. Many of them subsequently turned towards evangelicalism.22 The Basel Mission's leadership

18 Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas, Chicago 2000, p. 17.

19 Sarasin, Stadt der Bürger, p. 91–119; Schär, Tropenliebe, p. 38–78; Janner, Zwischen Machtanspruch und Autoritätsverlust, p. 73–160.

20 Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, p. 59.

21 Regina Wecker, 1833 bis 1910. Die Entwicklung zur Grossstadt, in: Georg Kreis/ Beat von Wartburg (eds.), Basel. Geschichte einer städtischen Gesellschaft, Basel 2000, p. 196–224.

22 Martin W. Pernet, Nietzsche und das "fromme" Basel, Basel 2014, p. 41–64; Janner, Zwischen Machtanspruch und Autoritätsverlust, p. 161–293.

consisted of a self-perpetuating circle of men, called the Committee, that usually had about twelve members, mostly academics, politicians, jurists, merchants, bankers and manufacturers originating from patrician families.23 While they prevailed numerically, representatives of the Pietist theological elite of Wurttemberg, especially from Tubingen University, also held key policymaking positions. The Inspector, for example, who was in charge of daily administration, was usually a German theologian.24

By 1821, the Committee members had decided to establish their own mission stations abroad and subsequently tried to take root in Russia, China, India and Africa, most notably on the Gold Coast in 1828 and in Cameroon in 1885. Officially, this move assured that the distinctive Pietist worldview was brought to regions that were still labouring in "unchristian darkness," as the Committee expounded.25 Most Committee members, however, also had strong economic incentives in expanding their sphere of influence overseas. Some of Basel's most prominent merchants sat on the Basel Mission's board of directors and on the mission's trade commission. The Basel Mission's trade commission gave rise to the Basel Mission Trading Company, founded in 1859. The corporation, which remained under direct Basel Mission management until 1917, supplied mission stations in West Africa and South India with European goods and traded cacao, palm oil, rubber and cotton on a global scale.26

23 Thirty-three of the forty men who served on the Committee between 1815 and 1900 had relatives in positions of responsibility in the Basel Mission. The admission and re-election of a Committee member had to be decided unanimously by all other members to avoid disagreements. On the social makeup of the Basel Mission Committee, see Jon Miller, Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control. Organizational Contradictions in the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, 1828–1917, London/New York 2003, p. 38–45.

24 The Inspector was chosen from the existing Committee members and had to be elected unanimously. See Tobias Eiselen, "Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar für den Missionskrieg". Basler Missionarsausbildung im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Werner Ustorf (ed.), Mission im Kontext. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, Bremen 1986, p. 47–120, here p. 48–49.

25 Wilhelm Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission 1815–1915, vol. 1, Basel 1916, p. 93.

26 Gustav Wanner, Die Basler Handels-Gesellschaft A.G. 1859–1959, Basel 1959; Giorgio Miescher, Hermann Ludwig Rottmann. Zu den Anfängen der Basler Missions-Handels-Gesellschaft in Christiansborg (Ghana), in: Lilo Roost Vischer/Anne Mayor/Dag Henrichsen (eds.), Werkschau Afrikastudien, vol. 2: Brücken und Grenzen, Münster 1999, p. 345–362; Andrea Franc, Wie die Schweiz zur Schokolade kam. Der Kakaohandel der

The Basel Mission was materialised, and their leadership provided, by the representatives of a visible and stable religious, political and economic elite. The Basel Mission Trading Company was created to provide a Christian commercial alternative to colonial traders, who, the Committee members argued, often exploited and corrupted the people in their sphere of influence. Basel Mission traders were the first to ship cacao from the Gold Coast overseas in 1893, turning the British colony into the world's largest cocoa exporter over the next few years. The success of the trading company was much welcomed by its shareholders, mostly Basel patricians, who received six per cent of revenue as a dividend. By 1914, the number of traders trained at the mission seminary in Basel exceeded that of common missionaries in West Africa.27 This illustrates the converging interests between worldwide evangelicalism and trade.

The Basel patricians benefitted from the rise of industrial modes of production, the establishment of large-scale factories and the expansion of the world economy. The new mechanical engineering, metal and chemical industries created an increasing demand for labour while the old silk industry survived the industrial transition by sourcing raw materials overseas and establishing a significant export market in the United States. At the same time, these fundamental economic transformations also triggered serious social consequences. In the "old city of faith," as contemporaries referred to Basel, the radical economic changes and social upheavals were feared to diminish the influence of Pietism Basel's ruling elite responded to these challenges by building an extensive welfare network. Voluntary service and honorary work were the driving forces of this system, which was built on the tenets of Christian charity.28

Basler Handelsgesellschaft mit der Kolonie Goldküste (1893–1960), Basel 2008; Heinrich Christ, Zwischen Religion und Geschäft. Die Basler Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft und ihre Unternehmensethik, 1859–1917, Basel 2015.

27 Heinrich Christ, Mission und Geld. Die Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft, in: Christine Christ-von Wedel/Thomas K. Kuhn (eds.), Basler Mission.   Jahrhundert, in: Josef Mooser/Simon Wenger (eds.), Armut und Fürsorge in Basel. Armutspolitik vom 13. Jahrhundert bis heute, Basel 2011, p. 134–142.

### *2.1.3 The Social Question*

In a global trading town like Basel, industrial paternalism and private charity were believed to be the best options for alleviating the social question. Significantly, it was a private society, the *Freiwillige Armenpflege*— Voluntary Poor Relief—that coordinated welfare work in Basel without any state supervision until 1897. This approach found its earliest and strongest expression in the *Gesellschaft zur Aufmunterung und Beförderung des Guten und Gemeinnützigen (GGG)*—Society for the Encouragement and Promotion of Works of Public Benefit and Utility founded in 1777. Initiated by the philosopher, historian and educator Isaak Iselin, and supported by a large number of conservative merchant families, this society brought together humanitarian and Pietist circles to address socio-political issues, such as poor relief and education policy.29

Trade and industry flourished rapidly in Basel over the nineteenth century, as a result of the improvement of Rhine navigation in the 1820s, the arrival of the railways in 1845 and the expansion of global markets.30 The population of 22,000 inhabitants in the 1830s had almost doubled by 1860 and by 1900 Basel was the second Swiss city after Zurich to count over 100,000 inhabitants. Child labour, long working hours and an overall underpaid and undernourished working class were part of the cityscape. The majority of Basel's inhabitants were neither wealthy nor clean and healthy at this time. Overcrowded and unsanitary housing facilities, together with an insufficient sewer system and poor water supply, resulted in frequent typhus and cholera epidemics.31 For the Basel patricians, the greatest threat to the social order, to a compliant, well-regulated labour force, and to their own ascendancy, was a population living in poverty.

29 Sara Janner, GGG 1777–1914. Basler Stadtgeschichte im Spiegel der "Gesellschaft für das Gute und Gemeinnützige", Basel 2015; Beatrice Schumacher, Braucht es uns? Selbstbilder, Arbeitsweisen und organisatorische Strukturen der Schweizerischen Gemeinnützigen Gesellschaft (1810–1970), in: ibid. (ed.), Freiwillig verpflichtet. Gemeinnütziges Denken und Handeln in der Schweiz seit 1800, Zürich 2010, p. 37–69.

30 Basel was the first Swiss city to be connected to the railways and became the leading commercial city in the Swiss Confederation. See Wecker, 1833 bis 1910. Die Entwicklung zur Grossstadt.

31 Martin Schaffner, Die Basler Arbeiterbevölkerung im 19. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zur Geschichte ihrer Lebensformen, Basel/Stuttgart 1972; Luca Trevisan, Das Wohnungselend der Basler Arbeiterbevölkerung in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 1989.

The *GGG* formed a commission to investigate the conditions of factory workers in the early 1840s and subsequently introduced a broad range of measures to address these hygienic and social shortcomings.32 These included the foundation of retail cooperatives, the promotion of health insurance and assistance funds as well as the construction of social housing estates and public bath and laundry facilities from the 1860s. Educational programmes directed at the working class such as reading circles, choir societies and gymnastic clubs complemented these practical measures.33 The ever-increasing misery, however, radically contradicted the idea that private philanthropy and Christian charity would put an end to the social question. The social precariousness of the growing population triggered upheavals, waves of strikes and demands for political reforms throughout Europe in the 1860s and 1870s.

The Basel patricians used their welfare system based on private donations as a political instrument to argue against the need for the state to intervene in welfare work, opposing the legal right to state care. In light of ever-stronger working-class and democratic movements, however, they conceded limited state regulations to improve the conditions of factory workers, thereby hoping to increase social stability and protect their dominant position. In the wake of industrial regulations implemented by the governments in the cantons of Glarus and Zurich, they too introduced factory laws in November of 1869 and supported the implementation of the Swiss Factory Act eight years later.34

Nevertheless, public welfare in Basel still crucially depended on the benevolence of the conservative elite. According to a survey prompted by the first social democrat in the cantonal Parliament, Eugen Wullschleger,

32 In 1843, the *GGG* published an extensive study on the working conditions in Basel's silk ribbon factories: Gesellschaft für das Gute und Gemeinnützige (ed.), Über die Fabrikarbeiter-Verhältnisse der Baseler Industrie. Berichterstattung einer von der Baselerischen Abteilung der Schweizerischen Gemeinnützigen Gesellschaft aufgestellten Kommission, Basel 1843. See further William O. Shanahan, Der deutsche Protestantismus vor der sozialen Frage 1815–1871, München 1962, p. 378; Sarasin, Stadt der Bürger, p. 51.

33 Martin Lengwiler, Wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Der Einfluss der Gelehrtengesellschaften und Experten auf die Sozialpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Josef Mooser/ Simon Wenger (des.), Armut und Fürsorge in Basel. Armutspolitik vom 13. Jahrhundert bis heute, Basel 2011, p. 111–122, here p. 116–117.

34 Basel's factory laws were the first of their kind resulting from Protestant initiative in the German-speaking world. See Shanahan, Der deutsche Protestantismus, p. 382.

Basel housed over one hundred societies and institutions dedicated to poverty relief and health care in 1903.35 Forty-eight were run privately, eighteen belonged to the *GGG,* sixteen to the reformed church, fourteen were state-owned facilities and six belonged to the so-called *Bürgergemeinde*—civil community. The Basel patricians, who dominated the *Bürgergemeinde,* the reformed church, the *GGG* and the majority of the private societies, controlled more than four-fifths of these organisations. Their financial contributions also amounted to four-fifths of the total funds employed for poverty alleviation, a total of 4.2 million Swiss francs in 1903.36