Join us for the inaugural Selwyn Book Talk, featuring Dr Tom Smith (Selwyn College) discussing his new book, Word Across the Water (Cornell University Press, 2024).
In this work, Tom Smith brings the histories of Hawai‘i and the Philippines into conversation to explore how American Protestant missionaries shaped, and were shaped by, US imperial expansion in the Pacific. Acting as self-styled interpreters of history, missionaries crafted compelling historical narratives to justify and promote both their evangelising mission and the broader imperial project, framing both within a divinely ordained trajectory.
Yet these narratives did more than serve the empire. As missionaries navigated local contexts and the complexities of cross-cultural encounter, their historical storytelling became a way to negotiate their own position, caught between the imperial centre and the realities of island life.
Word Across the Water challenges scholars of empire, religion, and transnational history to reckon with both the ideological force and the on-the-ground fragility of imperial claims over oceanic space, especially when underpinned by religious authority.
