Heavenly Fatherland

A history of German Protestant missionaries, Heavenly Fatherland investigates the theological, cultural, and political activities of missionaries and their allies in Germany and the German colonial empire before World War I.

Jeremy Best is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Iowa State University of Science and Technology.

"Heavenly Fatherland emphasizes and relies upon archival sources that amplify the international reach of Missionswissenschaftler. In doing so, it offers an important opportunity for scholars to examine missionaries’ role overseas more holistically."

Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University:

"Framed within an awareness of the limitations of his study on colonialism and missionary activities, this is an excellent book. Even when assessing some of Best’s interpretations differently, Heavenly Fatherland is an important read."

David Ciarlo, University of Colorado Boulder:

"Jeremy Best's Heavenly Fatherland offers an insightful new perspective on Germany's overseas engagement – one that makes us seriously rethink many of the broader characterizations about the nationalism, colonialism, and racism of the Kaiserreich."

Brandon Bloch, University of Wisconsin-Madison:

"In the past twenty-five years, historians of Germany’s short-lived colonial empire have delved into the impact of colonialism on ideas of race and nation in imperial Germany. Jeremy Best’s Heavenly Fatherland is a lively and illuminating contribution to this literature."

Robert E. Alvis, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology:

"In Heavenly Fatherland, an important new study of German Protestant missionary work in the years 1860–1914, Jeremy Best challenges his readers to rethink what they understand to be true about Germany’s colonial past by shedding light on the prominent role that Protestant missionaries played in that project."

Sara Pugach, Professor of History, California State University, Los Angeles:

"Bringing German Protestant missionaries to the forefront of the history of German imperialism and colonialism, Jeremy Best highlights a group that has been largely overlooked in English language scholarship and makes it his focal point. Rounding out the increasingly complex history of German interactions with the wider world in the modern period, Best provides an important service to the discipline."

Robbie Aitken, Professor of Imperial History, Sheffield Hallam University:

"Heavenly Fatherland is an impressive, well-researched, and timely piece of work, which sheds considerable light on German missionary enterprise both at home and abroad and complicates our understandings of German discourses on race."