Missionary Diplomacy

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.

Emily Conroy-Krutz is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University. She is the author of Christian Imperialism.

Missionary Diplomacy is one of those unique books that straddles multiple domains in a broadly erudite manner while still succeeding at being readable, thought-provoking, and leaving the reader with a better grasp of a meaningful swathe of history.

Providing a well-balanced assessment of missionaries and their work is a challenging task, but Emily Conroy-Krutz manages to do it successfully in Missionary Diplomacy, which is a painstakingly researched and clearly written history of the shifting relationship between US missionaries and the US government from the early 1800s to 1920.

In her outstanding second book, Missionary Diplomacy, Emily Conroy-Krutz tackles the question how scholars can make sense of the relationship between US Protestant missions and US foreign affairs in the nineteenth century. The book deserves a wide readership.

Impressively researched, this volume will be of considerable interest to international lawyers who recall that Presbyterian clergy in China played a critical role in making Henry Wheaton's treatise on international law accessible to a Chinese readership.