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Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. By emily conroy-krutz. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. 244 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Christian Imperialism by Emily Conroy-Krutz is one of more than twenty volumes comprising the series The United States in the World, which explores how people, ideas, processes and events have transcended national borders to shape U.S. history from the antebellum period to the present. Historian Conroy-Krutz is a prof essor at Michigan State University specializing in global history of the early American republic. Her articles and essays focus on the American evangelical movement, the development of an American imperial mindset in the early republic, and the reliance by American evangelicals on British imperial connections outside North America. This is her first book, and she uses it to advance these interests on a broad, global scale by traci ng the activi ties of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which operated within the Cherokee Nation and at more than forty foreign locations in the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific during the years 1810 to 1850. The ABCFM was the largest, most successf ul, and best-documented American foreign missionary society during this time period. Founded in 1810 by a small group of Williams College students who had been energized by the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening, the ABCFM operated out of Boston and sent its first group of missionaries to India in 1812.
The centerpiece of Conroy-Krutz's argument is that American Christian missionaries acted as imperialists because...