particular interests in American empire and the international dimensions of American religion and reform. He first book, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (2015) focuses on the American foreign mission movement and American imperialism through the 1840s. Her second book, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (2024) focuses on the connections between Protestant missions and the US Department of State from 1810 to 1924. She teaches at Michigan State University.
Conroy-Krutz applied the “Page 99 Test” to Missionary Diplomacy and reported the following:
Page 99 of Missionary Diplomacy finds us in the Ottoman Empire, where American missionaries are asking the United States to send more consular representatives to support them in their work. Missionaries did not think there was a sufficient American presence in the region to guarantee their safety. Yet this did not stop them from proceeding. Instead, they appealed to the government to extend its reach. At the center of the page, we see missionaries celebrating the arrival of US warships in 1834. They were relieved at “the sight of our flag” and expected that the show of American strength would allow them to “derive important protection in times of danger.”Visit Emily Conroy-Krutz's website.
So how does the Page 99 Test work for Missionary Diplomacy? Surprisingly well, actually. It’s hard to get the essence of a 275-page book on a single page, but this discussion of missionary connections to the consular system helps to get at some of the book’s central themes. How did missionaries shape American diplomacy? And how was the mission movement shaped by American policy? These questions guided much of the book’s research, and we can see some of the answers to both questions play out in this short snippet from the larger text.
In the first hundred pages of the book, readers will have learned about the different geographies of the early nineteenth century missionary and diplomatic projects. Missionary interest in “converting the world” had them seeking out places that were not of immediate concern to American diplomats in the first half of the century—Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. Missionaries positioned themselves as the American experts on these regions of the world and sought to direct American attention to (and shape American understandings of) the places that they cared about. Over the course of the century, this saw missionaries calling for a more robust diplomatic and consular presence across the globe. The 1834 missionaries celebrating the arrival of warships provide one example of an entanglement that would only grow over the course of the century.
The rest of the book examines the ways that missionaries drew American diplomats into new spaces, shaped discussions about foreign policy, and framed global issues for an American audience. Chapters explore mission work in China, Japan, Korea, the Caroline Islands, Hawaii, Turkey, Iran, Greece, Congo, and more. If the idea of missionaries cheering at the sight of warships surprises you, the book will provide many opportunities to consider the ways that the mission movement both shaped and was shaped by American foreign policy through the first world war.
The Page 99 Test: Christian Imperialism.
--Marshal Zeringue
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