There is a beautiful chapter, "Missionary Science", by John Stenhouse in the recently published volume 8 of the series, The Cambridge History of Science.
Here is one of many gems.
William Carey (1761–1834), an ex-cobbler who led the British Baptist mission to India from 1792, urged readers ... to imitate the “universal benevolence and genuine philanthropy” of “God himself ” by spreading useful knowledge with the gospel. An avid gardener and self-taught botanist, Carey hoped to help Indians periodically decimated by famine by introducing Western agriculture and horticulture, including crop rotation, land reclamation, experimental introductions of new plants, and the European plough and harrow. Establishing the largest private botanical garden in Asia (in which he prayed each morning), Carey founded an Agricultural and Horticultural Society, exchanged seeds, plants, and ideas with gardeners, botanists, and missionaries around the world, and wrote and lectured on the natural history of Bengal. The East India Company had long opposed missionary work as likely to anger Hindus and Muslims and disrupt trade; Carey oiled relations by befriending Company botanists and publishing their major botanical works (such as William Roxburgh’s Flora Indica) on the mission press.
When an American evangelical wrote threatening to withhold money unless the Baptists focused on theological training, not science, Carey replied: “I have never heard of anything more illiberal. Pray can youth be trained up for the Christian ministry without science? Do you in America train youth for it without any knowledge of science?”
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