Missionary Diplomacy
Missionary Diplomacy

Author: Emily Conroy-Krutz

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-03-15

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 150177400X

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Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.

Word across the Water
Word across the Water

Author: Tom Smith

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1501777424

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In Word Across the Water, Tom Smith brings the histories of Hawai'i and the Philippines together to argue that US imperial ambitions towards these Pacific archipelagos were deeply intertwined with the work of American Protestant missionaries. As self-styled interpreters of history, missionaries produced narratives to stoke interest in their cause, locating US imperial interventions and their own evangelistic projects within divinely ordained historical trajectories. As missionaries worked in the shadow of their nation's empire, however, their religiously inflected historical narratives came to serve an alternative purpose. They emerged as a way for missionaries to negotiate their own status between the imperial and the local and to come to terms with the diverse spaces, peoples, and traditions of historical narration that they encountered across different island groups. Word Across the Water encourages scholars of empire and religion alike to acknowledge both the pernicious nature of imperial claims over oceanic space underpinned by religious and historical arguments, and the fragility of those claims on the ground.

American Empire in the Pacific
American Empire in the Pacific

Author: Arthur Power Dudden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-16

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1351959387

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American Empire in the Pacific explores the empire that emerged from the Oregon Treaty of 1846 with Great Britain and the outcome of the Mexican War in 1848. Together, they signalled the mastery of the United States over the continent of North America; the Pacific Ocean and the ancient civilizations of Asia at last lay within reach. England's East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries had introduced Asian wares including tea to the American colonists, but wars against France and then the struggle for American independence held back expansion by Yankee entrepreneurs until 1783. Thereafter, from the Atlantic seaboard, American ships began regularly to reach China. Merchants, sailors and missionaries, motivated toward trade and redemption like the Europeans they met along the way, encountered the exotic peoples and cultures of the Pacific. Would-be empire builders projected a manifest destiny without limits. Russian Alaska, the native kingdom of Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, Samoa, and Spain's Philippine Islands, as well as a transcontinental railroad and an isthmian canal, acquired strategic significance in American minds, in time to outweigh both commerce and conversion.

A Study of the Emergence and Early Development of Selected Protestant Chinese Churches in the Philippines
A Study of the Emergence and Early Development of Selected Protestant Chinese Churches in the Philippines

Author: Jean Uy Uayan

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2017-06-30

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1783682825

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Dr Jean Uayan comprehensively weaves the story of six Protestant Chinese churches in the Philippines into the local history of their individual settings in this important study. Uncovering new insight and historical information from extensive primary and secondary sources, Uayan presents a rich and previously unacknowledged heritage and support from four American mission organisations during the US occupation from 1898–1946. The seeds sown amongst Chinese communities across the Philippines resulted in indigenous churches that took differing journeys to full independence and now are also bearing fruit in missionary activity in South Fujian, China. This book is an important contribution towards a global church history acknowledging the work of the Holy Spirit establishing and building up the church of Jesus Christ among the nations.