American Missionaries in a Global Early American Republic

Abstract

American Missionaries in a Global Early American Republic Maureen Connors Santelli (bio) Emily Conroy-Krutz. Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. xvii + 244 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $45.00. Christine Leigh Heyrman. American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. 340pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00. Historical scholarship that emphasizes a connection between the history of the early United States and a global community is an important, yet recent, addition to the field. Rosemarie Zagarri’s “The Significance of the Global Turn,” published in 2011, called upon historians of the early republic to consider a global approach to studying “peoples and regions in parts of the world that have not usually been considered as part of the traditional narrative.”1 While historians of Colonial America, the British Empire, and Latin America had already embraced the global paradigm, historians of the early American republic still seem to resist this transition. Indeed, the scholarship of the early American republic has evolved dramatically in the last several decades, transitioning from New England community case studies to an expanded Atlantic World, connecting the history of the early United States with Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Within the last decade, the “global turn” has made inroads into early American scholarship. Historians of the Atlantic World have argued that early Americans were not isolated from the outside world, but were rather active participants. Nicholas Canny and Peter Coclanis, for example, have argued that the Atlantic World paradigm provides an important arena for analysis, but they conclude that there are clear links between the “Atlantic World” and regions much farther east, including the greater Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean trade networks. By expanding their focus outside of the Atlantic World, historians of the early republic can take up a new framework for considering a broader global significance of the period.2 [End Page 418] In light of the global turn combined with the current discussion about the war on terror, historians have delved into the origins of U.S. contact with the East. Historians such as Robert Allison, Lawrence A. Peskin, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, and Angelo Repousis have considered a range of subjects addressing these origins through U.S. merchants, sailors, reformers, and missionaries.3 These historians, and others, have demonstrated that a global perspective can offer not just an expanded vision of early American history, but can better explain the extent to which early Americans knew of a broader world and interacted with it. Further, they can question whether this contact made lasting impressions on the development of the early republic. Emily Conroy-Krutz’s Christian Imperialism and Christine Leigh Heyrman’s American Apostles provide useful perspectives on the contact made by U.S. merchants and missionaries in the eastern Mediterranean, Asia, and Africa. With particular focus on the development of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Conroy-Krutz and Heyrman contextualize the intellectual and religious origins of the foreign missions movement. In addition, both offer analysis on how contact with the greater world influenced the missionaries themselves as well as to what extent they won hearts and souls for an American understanding of Christianity and democracy. The two authors, however, take up different aspects of the foreign missions movement and suggest slightly different frameworks for how missionaries fit into a larger perspective on U.S. imperialism. Emily Conroy-Krutz’s organizational study of the New England–based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) reveals a global evangelizing effort that brought Americans not only to the western frontiers of North America but also to India, Burma (Myanmar), Singapore, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and Liberia. Operating from a perspective of empire that was concerned with the reform and improvement of civilizations abroad, the ABCFM was less interested in establishing an overseas American empire and more interested in spreading a Christian empire as defined by New England Protestant evangelicals. Addressing the organizational successes and setbacks of the ABCFM from 1810 to 1860, Conroy-Krutz provides a well-researched overview of how Protestant missionaries endeavored to spread what she calls “Christian imperialism,” a...