The history of mission has not lacked attention and in recent years has received some incentives from various corners. David Maxwell, for instance, argued for a revision of the relationship between mission and science, whereas Robert Woodberry saw a connection between the history of mission and democracy. The revisionist wave, in which studies of empire set out to re-explore mission, which had hitherto largely been regarded as a mere function of imperialism, probably reached a plateau with Andrew Porter's 2004 Religion versus empire?, and has continued ever since. One dimension that may have been somewhat neglected is the relation between mission and education, and it is here that Birgit Herppich positions her book.

Pitfalls of trained incapacity is a densely written study that takes the Basel Mission in Ghana as its subject. In itself this is hardly original. The Basel Mission has been of interest to historians and religious scholars for a long time, being one of the first missionary organisations. It was established by Germans and Swiss in 1815 as a non-denominational missionary organisation with a global aspiration. The Basel Mission was responsible for despatching workers to China, Latin America, various African states and Indonesia. Its first missionary project in 1828 was in the Danish territory in Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, which is a point of departure for Herppich's study.

The focus of her book is the Basel Missionary Training Institute, established to prepare missionaries for their work overseas. Training missionaries was, according to Wilbert Shenk's comments on the cover, ‘an afterthought of the Protestant missionary movement’. The first Protestant missionary organisations had been established in the 1790s in England and, starting with William Carey, despatched missionaries to foreign territories. It was eventually recognised that they needed to be prepared, the raison d’être of the Basel Missionary Training Institute. Missionaries often had a relatively humble background, needing to be trained in practical skills that would aid their work, such as medical knowledge, and obviously some theological understanding. Less recognised was the need for cultural awareness in its broadest sense, and it is in this context that Herppich launches her main thesis: the BMTI curriculum was marked by trained incapacity.

Trained incapacity is a term from sociology coined by the Norwegian scholar Thorstein Veblen to describe how training and experience can lead people to rely on their skills in knowledge precisely in such a way that they remain unaware of certain aspects, have blind spots or prove unable to adapt to changing circumstances. In Herppich's view, this is precisely what happened with the Basel missionaries. Trained in the cultural and educational context of early nineteenth-century German Pietism, their skills, theology and above all cultural values prepared them for failure in the cultural, political and social setting of Ghana.

Herppich's interest in the matter was triggered by her own experience working in Ghana. She gained her PhD from the Fuller Seminary in Pasadena and is now coordinator for WEC International, a global organisation that prepares and trains missionaries. Both her past experience as teacher and missionary in Ghana and her current interest naturally intersect with the research topic of her book. Indeed, she claims that the effects and evaluation of teaching and missionary work are often conducted in self-assessment, rather than from an outside perspective.

The outline of her study is well-structured. The first part has a thematic approach and studies the BMTI as a ‘community of learning’, in which students are trained as a group within a specific German Pietist educational, social and cultural setting. This is followed by a chapter in which the central vision of the missionaries is explained, a common purpose that focuses on sharing the Gospel globally. The third chapter deals with the ‘shared practices’ of the students as a result of being trained as a group. The second part is a chronological analysis, in which these concepts are explored in the work of the missionaries in Ghana between 1828 and 1840.

The combination of several clear-cut sociological concepts and thorough and detailed historical research makes for a pleasant and informative read, and on the whole Herppich's argument is solid, convincing and substantiated. Even so, a possible critique would be to question the apparent circularity of Herppich's central argument, for precisely that which she sets out to research appears to be the starting point of her research. Even if it rings intuitively true that missionaries were ill-prepared to deal with the culture shock that they experienced in Ghana, and that they brought with them European preconceptions, for Herppich this seems to be an a priori proposition. The focus of the book is not so much to prove this, but rather to explore its nature and origin. Whereas the way in which she sets out to do this is convincing, it leaves little room for different perspectives. This, I believe, could be the case, for instance, in her discussion of what she described as a ‘shared vision’, a common goal of the learning community that she analyses. The shared vision is sharing the Gospel with the heathens in distant lands, an obvious goal for a missionary organisation. However, broadly stated such as this, it was a goal liable to considerably varied interpretations – a notion that she passes over rather quickly on page 72, but which seems essential in establishing whether the Basel Mission achieved or failed in its endeavour. And whilst she makes allowances for the ‘adjustments’ that some missionaries made, she concludes that trained incapacity was evident. Indeed, she also concludes that that this trained incapacity was the ultimate cause of the failure to convert Ghanaians (p. 341).

This critique is not so much to devalue Herppich's wonderful book, but serves as a warning not to take the central argument, convincing as it may seem, at face value. All in all, Herppich has written a well-researched and well-argued book at the innovative and fruitful intersection of educational and missionary studies. Anyone interested in the history of Christian mission, education or imperialism would benefit from reading her book.