Much of the scholarship on missionary movements in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century regards missionaries as agents of imperialism and a destabilizing force that contributed to the polarization of the Empire's different religious communities. In this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Scott Rank discusses the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and explains how Protestant missionaries were also part of an intercommunal dialogue that contributed to larger discussions about secularism, education and the emerging notion of progress in the Ottoman Empire.
Scott Rank is a PhD candidate at Central European University in Budapest studying religion, culture and society in the Ottoman Empire
Chris Gratien is a PhD student studying the history of the modern Middle East at Georgetown University (see http://georgetown.academia.edu/ChrisGratien)
Nicholas Danforth is a PhD student studying the history of modern Turkey at Georgetown University (see http://georgetown.academia.edu/NicholasDanforth)
Select Bibliography:
Deringil, Selim. The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999.
Kieser, Hans-Lukas. Iskalanmış Barış: Doğu Vilayetlerinde Misyonerlik, Etnik Kimlik ve Devlet: 1839-1938 (The Missed Peace: Missions, Ethnic Identity and the State in the Easter Provinces, 1839-1938). Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005).
Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
______. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Salt, Jeremy. Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896. London: Frank Cass, 1993.
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