Competing Kingdoms

“Competing Kingdoms reveals the complex and unpredictable results of the missionary enterprise, showing how the work of American women simultaneously constructed and destabilized gender, cultural, and racial hierarchies, with significant results for sending and receiving cultures alike. The tensions suggested in the volume’s title play out in fascinating detail in its pages.” - Andrew Witmer, Journal of American History

“This fine collection links together individual case studies from Africa, North America, India, China, and Japan. The authors carefully place their work in the relevant literature of cultural histories of US empire and post-colonial theory…. Selections from this book would be effective readings in courses on US foreign policy and women’s history, as well as in various sub-fields (Native American, Chinese, Japanes, African, and Middle Eastern History).” - Jeremy Rich, Canadian Journal of History

“Competing Kingdoms achieves through the inclusion of many authors what few have been able to achieve singly: the internationalization of American women’s history. It focuses on a group of culture agents who were at the avant-garde of America’s emergence into global influence: women missionaries.” - Ann Braude, author of Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion

“This rich, diverse collection of essays illuminates women’s pivotal role in the Protestant missions that were at the center of Americans’ interactions with Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. Throughout the pieces, readers witness the women that made missions possible—not only as missionaries, but also as sponsors and audiences—navigating the tensions and intersections between ideals and practices of spiritual equality and those of patriarchy, empire, and race, enlisting and challenging gendered conventions in the process. This volume will prove an indispensable guide in the effort to bring gender analysis, religious culture, and women’s agency into an internationalized historiography of the United States.” - Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines

“Competing Kingdoms presents fresh and wide-ranging scholarship on gender and mission, linking it to American cultural expansionism (1812–1960).” - Maina Chawla Singh, International Bulletin of Missionary Research

“[A]n important and welcome collection of essays. . . . The attempt to connect gender and foreign relations succeeds thanks to the breadth of scholarship in this volume and the diverse but focused essays that comprise it. . . . [A] groundbreaking contribution to US history.” - Johanna Selles, Missiology

“In Competing Kingdoms, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo bring together a group of emerging and established historians in an innovative project of bringing insights from American mission women’s history into the framework of American cultural imperialism. . . . This collection offers fertile directions for scholars concerned with American imperialism and more generally with the thorny questions of gender, missions, and empires. We can look forward to many of these historians producing book-length accounts where they can develop their research findings more fully. The editors are to be congratulated.” - Patricia Grimshaw, Journal of Church and State