Missionaries and the Birth of International Development

Abstract

The United States is the world's leading provider of foreign aid. I examine the role of Protestant missionaries abroad in fostering support for international development. I use the travel routes of recruiters from the Student Volunteer Movement, the largest missionary movement in America at the turn of the twentieth century, to generate plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to missionaries across church denominations and regions. I find that a 10-percent increase in missionaries led to a 8-percentage point rise in the probability of congressional votes for foreign aid bills that established modern development assistance during the mid-twentieth century. Exploring mechanisms, I show that exposure to missionaries led church denominations to endorse foreign aid in congressional testimony and encouraged congressional representatives to adopt language showing broader responsibility for people outside their own communities, consistent with evidence that proponents of foreign aid began to defend it on the basis of human dignity instead of strategic interests. Biographical records of missionaries reveal that missionaries emerged as key experts, producing social scientific knowledge on non-European societies and offering critical insights to government agencies during the formative years of global development initiatives. In the long run, exposure to missionaries led to a larger number of Peace Corps volunteers, reflecting a sustained commitment to international development.