Description
Analyses of religion in historical international relations have tended to focus on either its role as an identity marker that constitutes different groups (Keene 2005; Nexon 2009; Costa Lopez 2016) or on its ideational dimension through studies of political theology (Bain 2017). This, however, obscures the ways in which religion has been articulated in a variety of social practices and historical contexts, and how this has served to constitute different internationals. In order to highlight the social element of religion, this paper zooms in on a particular religious practice – proselytism – and a specific community of practitioners - missionaries. Surprisingly, despite occasional mentions in the literature, extant scholarship has not addressed missionaries as international actors. In order to do this, this paper looks at Catholic missionaries from the thirteenth century renewed missionary impulse to the sixteenth century colonization of America. By looking at their training, activities, traveling, and daily practices, the paper sketches a social history of missionaries that reveals a distinct international imaginary that challenges common disciplinary conceptions.
