Seldom today are the American college and seminary students who became the first modern missionaries to foreign lands considered intellectuals, let alone progressives. The Role of the American Board in the World, produced from a selection of papers given at a 2010 Boston conference commemorating the bicentennial of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), should help to undermine the still enduring, cartoonish stereotype of nineteenth to early twentieth-century American Protestant missionaries.

This collection of articles represents the most comprehensive overview of board missions in the Middle East, China, Japan, South East Asia, India, and Polynesia since Clifton Jackson Phillips's 1954 dissertation on the first fifty years of the ABCFM was published by Harvard's East Asian Research Center in 1969. The book's introduction by Clifford Putney and the afterword by Char Miller effectively tie the articles to each other and to their broader historical, cultural, and institutional context.

However, with the exception of Hamish Ion's article on ABCFM missionaries in Meiji Japan, the chapters rely solely on Western, mostly English, language sources of the missionaries and their employer. The “Native voice” is largely missing. While this criticism needs to be set within the context of the vastness of ABCFM collections around the world, and the time required to develop a reading competency in an Asian or Polynesian language, it's doubtful such practical constraints will silence contemporary anti-missionary critics. It will likely take many more books with more attempts to insert the “missionized” before early modern missionaries are pulled out of the boiling pot.