Abstract
This chapter surveys the literature on the long-term impact of Christian missionaries in Latin America and Asia. It focuses on human capital, making the argument that religious missionaries constituted a “first wave” of global mass education. The chapter is centered on the academic contributions by Maria Waldinger (Journal of Development Economics 127:355–378, 2017) and Felipe Valencia Caicedo (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 134:507–556, 2019), on the long-lasting educational impact of Catholic missionaries in Mexico and South America, respectively. It relates these findings to the literature on the indirect effects of religion and the economics of education. It also draws parallels and contrasts with other missionary experiences in Latin America, Africa and, primarily, Asia. It concludes by offering tentative directions for future research on the socioeconomic and cultural legacies of missions in the Americas and beyond.
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Notes
- 1.
See the accompanying chapter in this book by Feliz Meier zu Selhausen, where he provides a revisionist historical interpretation of African missions, emphasizing the role of local agency.
- 2.
- 3.
I thank Karthik Muralidharan for suggesting this particular angle.
- 4.
See also Bruno Witzel’s chapter in this book.
- 5.
As shown in Fig. 3.1, Franciscans were the most numerous order from the outset.
- 6.
For a detailed historical study of the Mendicant orders in Mexico, see Ricard (1966). The next section covers the Jesuit missions in South America.
- 7.
Namely, she uses an instrumental variable identification strategy. The idea there is to find “exogenous” variation that affects the treatment, in this case missionary placement that does not have a direct effect on the outcome of interest, in this case schooling.
- 8.
The difference between the statistical effect in general versus trying to get at the causal effect, as in the previous footnote. Technically, her instrumental variable (IV) estimates are slightly weaker, but largely confirm the ordinary least square (OLS) findings for the two types of missions.
- 9.
Outside the Americas, the Jesuits established missions in China, India and Japan during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I cover these cases later on in the chapter.
- 10.
In this paper, I focus on formal education, though technically human capital is a bundle of goods, which also include health investments. Under this broader umbrella, I look at health interventions resulting from the missionary activities elsewhere later in the chapter.
- 11.
Economists have used these measures from satellite missions, to proxy for income, especially in places that lack proper income and production statistics, as in sub-Saharan Africa; for more details, see Henderson et al. (2012).
- 12.
There were no religious missionaries from other Catholic or Protestant orders in the Guarani area.
- 13.
The Rotter Locus of control measures how much people think they are in control of their lives, ranging from everything is predetermined (low score) to one is the captain of one’s destiny (high).
- 14.
For instance, the dictator, ultimatum and trust games.
- 15.
- 16.
In particular, following the oblique/horizontal cultural transmission from the Jesuits, there is evidence of vertical knowledge transmission sustaining these imported practices.
- 17.
In this well-known technique from psychology, respondents are “primed” to think about a given issue, such as politics or religion, using subliminal cues.
- 18.
- 19.
In part, the work is possible thanks to the very detailed registers of indigenous people, also known as padrones, studied by Takeda (2016).
- 20.
For an excellent historical overview of British missions, with a special focus on the British Empire in India, see Etherington (2005).
- 21.
Meaning that once one is able to read the Bible, one is capable of reading essentially any other text.
- 22.
These findings appear at odds with the work by Castelló-Climent et al. (2017), discussed later in this chapter.
- 23.
Technically, they focus on what in econometrics is known as the second stage, instead of the first. The approach is similar to the one taken by Acemoglu et al. (2014).
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
The role of (male) Cistercian monasteries had been already examined by Andersen et al. (2017).
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Acknowledgements
I thank the editors, Gabriele Cappelli and David Mitch, for extensive comments, as well as Chincheng Ma, Eric Roca, Alexander Lehner, Rosella Calvi, Dean Dulay, Eric Gómez-i-Aznar, Agustín Galán García and Felix Meier Zu Selhausen for comments, and for providing advanced versions of their work. All remaining errors are mine.
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Valencia Caicedo, F. (2019). Missionaries in Latin America and Asia: A First Global Mass Education Wave. In: Mitch, D., Cappelli, G. (eds) Globalization and the Rise of Mass Education. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25417-9_3
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