As a general rule, people are always more complicated than you think. Their motives are mixed. They don’t know what they want or they don’t (or often can’t) articulate what they want or why they do things. They can explain some of it, but many factors are just assumed. This is of the chief challenges of studying history. To boil people and events down to something we can categorize, or at the very least, write about in under 1000 pages, we have to throw some of the mix out. A bunch of it probably got thrown out before we even got a chance to study what happened.
This is one of the conclusions I’ve come to in the past month in reading several history books on Ethiopia. This is an exemplary passage that is at least aware of what I’m talking about here:
These facets of European interest in Ethiopia – the commercial, the official, the missionary and the scientific – were very much interconnected and reinforced each other. The scientists were not disinterested academics, but often engaged in political affairs. The missionaries enjoyed moral, and sometimes material, support from their states. Both missionaries and those who came on official missions dabbled in scientific or pseudo-scientific studies of the country. The missionary Krapf was actively involved in the negotiations from the treaty between Shawa and Britain. Sir George Annesley, who had come to Massawsa with the aim of conducting botanical and geographical investigations, readily engaged in exploring ways of promoting trade with Ethiopia. Nor was missionary activity totally divorced from commercial matters. Proselytization, it was hoped, would promote trade and capitalism.
-Bahre Zewde, A history of modern Ethiopia, p.25
Is this different today? Some, in the sense that Christianity is effectively divorced from the state in the west now. In fact, the defacto secularism of the state often serves to inhibit missionaries instead of aid them. At the same time, do big oil companies hold sway over the west’s foreign policy in the middle east? I don’t think anyone would argue that they don’t. The question is one of degree, ranging from “mild” to “puppet”. Religious conversion and conquest went hand-in-hand when Spain and Portugal took over much of Latin America. I think some people think the same thing continues to go on today. I agree, but with a twist. Before, God was at least given lip service, even if many of the players were in thrall to Mammon. Now, Mammon is definitely in charge, and his name invoked sacredly (economic development) on nearly all the mission statements.