This volume makes an interesting, if limited, contribution to the literature on Europe's Christian missions during the long nineteenth century. It studies the Basel Mission's commercial division, the ‘Mission Trading Company’, from its foundation in 1859 to its complete separation from the mission in 1917. As Christ points out, ties between mission and trading company remained intimate throughout this period. The company supplied the mission's outposts in western Africa and in India with European goods. As the company's largest shareholder, the mission also benefitted financially from the company's success, which became particularly noteworthy with its growing involvement in the export of Indian and African goods to Europe. Moreover, the mission had a significant presence on the trading company's board, even after the mission's leadership stopped naming the board's members.

Christ frames this book largely in terms of business history, drawing in particular on the research of Peter Ulrich and Hartmut Berghoff. Its three main chapters trace the trading company's foundation and initial decades of existence (1859–79), its evolution in the face of new Swiss rules governing corporations and challenges to the company's presence in Africa and India (1880–9), and the dramatic improvement in the company's fortunes between 1900 and 1914, due to the booming trade in cocoa. Each of these chapters is structured around the same five topics – strategic developments, finances, operations, personnel questions and profit distribution – a tack that lends a workmanlike quality to the discussion.

Throughout the work, Christ adroitly questions whether there was anything truly Protestant about this ‘Protestant enterprise’, which is how he arrives at the topic of business ethics. From the outset, he maintains, the very existence of the trading company provoked controversy. Some questioned whether the mission should be involved in for-profit activities, while others noted that, in addition to providing subsidies to the mission and supplying missionaries (what Christ labels ‘indirect charitable activity’), the trading company could directly contribute to the mission's work, for example by providing jobs for indigenous populations (which would help inculcate a Western work ethic). He stresses, too, that while the stockholders, board members and most of the traders were confirmed Pietists (some of the latter even hoped to become full-fledged missionaries), the trading company's operations were not discernibly different from those of their secular counterparts. By 1900, too, salaried employees were running more and more of the company's affairs, in Basel and overseas.

While well researched and clearly written, this monograph's engagement with the historical literature is limited. Christ is clearly aware of the study's broader context and in both the introduction and the footnotes, he duly refers to relevant titles. But rather than seeking to advance questions raised in these historiographies, for instance those concerning the relationship between missions and imperialism, the book remains fixated on its analytical framework and the theoretical questions that it raises.