Livingstone had believed in the power of the Gospel; Stanley believed only in brute force. Livingstone have… — Niall Ferguson
Livingstone had believed in the power of the Gospel; Stanley believed only in brute force. Livingstone have been appalled by slavery; Stanley would connive at its restoration. Above all, Livingstone had been indifferent to political frontiers; Stanley wanted to see Africa carved up. And so it was. In the time between Livingstone’s death in 1873 and Stanley’s death in 1904 around the third of Africa would be annexed to the British Empire; virtually all the rest would be taken over by a handful of other European powers. And it is only against this background of political domination that the conversion of sub-Saharan Africa to Christianity can be understood.
Commerce, Civilization and Christianity were to be conferred on Africa, just as Livingstone had intended. But they would arrive in conjunction with a fourth ‘C’: Conquest.
p. 161Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?
p. 355
