Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Part I: Networks of Empire
Chapter 1: Webs of Communication 13
Chapter 2: Missionary Lives, Transnational Networks: The Misses Margaret and Mary Leitch 28
Part II: Origins of American Empire
Chapter 3: The Missionary Impulse 49
Chapter 4: The Matrix of Moral Reform 74
Chapter 5: Blood, Souls, and Power: American Humanitarianism Abroad in the 1890s 98
Part III: The Challenge of American Colonialism
Chapter 6: Reforming Colonialism 123
Chapter 7: Opium and the Fashioning of the American Moral Empire 146
Chapter 8: Ida Wells and Others: Radical Protest and the Networks of American Expansion 166
Part IV: The Era of World War I and the Wilsonian New World Order
Chapter 9: States of Faith: Missions and Morality in Government 191
Chapter 10: To Make a Dry World: The New World Order of Prohibition 209
Conclusion: The Judgments of Heaven: Change and Continuity in Moral Reform 227
Notes 247
Index 309

Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home, and explores the methods and networks used by reformers to fashion a global and nonterritorial empire. He follows the transnational American response to internal pressures, the European colonies, and dynamic changes in global society.
Examining the cultural context of American expansionism from the 1870s to the 1920s, Tyrrell provides a new interpretation of Christian and evangelical missionary work, and he addresses America's use of "soft power." He describes evangelical reform's influence on American colonial and diplomatic policy, emphasizes the limits of that impact, and documents the often idiosyncratic personal histories, aspirations, and cultural heritage of moral reformers such as Margaret and Mary Leitch, Louis Klopsch, Clara Barton, and Ida Wells. The book illustrates that moral reform influenced the United States as much as it did the colonial and quasi-colonial peoples Americans came in contact with, and shaped the architecture of American dealings with the larger world of empires through to the era of Woodrow Wilson.
Investigating the wide-reaching and diverse influence of evangelical reform movements, Reforming the World establishes how transnational organizing played a vital role in America's political and economic expansion.

Ian Tyrrell is Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His books include Transnational Nation and Historians in Public.