In this finely researched study, Barbara Reeves-Ellington expands our understanding of the nineteenth-century American encounter with the Ottoman world by examining the complicated interactions among Protestant American missionaries and Orthodox Christian Bulgarians in Istanbul and the Ottoman Balkans. At the center of her book lies the “cultural formation of the Christian home” (19). According to Reeves-Ellington, this flexible concept, with roots in the evangelical culture of antebellum New England, shaped the practices and institutions of missionary life and provided a powerful tool to missionary men and women as they debated gendered power relations within the missionary enterprise. At the same time, she argues, ethnic Bulgarian Orthodox Christians appropriated and redeployed “exported American domestic ideals” (2) to ends that American proselytizers could never have anticipated. In Bulgarian hands, the “nationalist strains of American domesticity became an anti-colonial tool that thwarted American and Ottoman attempts to bring Bulgarians into a broader community” (10–11).

The first chapter draws on missionary memoirs, letters, and advice literature to explain the sources, meanings, and uses of the Christian home for men and women of the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which dispatched its first missionaries to Istanbul in 1831. Reeves-Ellington is particularly interested in the ways missionary wives struggled to adapt ideals emanating from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (a pioneering educator of missionary women) to new circumstances abroad, confronting but also capitalizing on the porous nature of the mission family, which might include schoolchildren and temporary visitors as well as immediate kin. Unsurprisingly, missionary men and women did not always see eye-to-eye on these matters, and the arrival of more single women missionaries in the 1870s only added new layers of complexity to debates about power and protocol in the missionary field.

The rest of the book is divided in four chapters, each detailing an episode that reveals how domestic discourse operated locally. Throughout, Reeves-Ellington seeks to move beyond what she sees as an unfortunate impasse in current scholarship on religion, women's history, and U.S. foreign relations. As she notes in her introduction, the “promise of the transnational turn” is yet “unfulfilled,” as historians have “barely begun to exploit the sources that could elaborate the redeployment of [domestic] ideals outside American networks”; too often, “the local environment” serves “simply as a backdrop to the missionary enterprise”(6). Drawing on a rich multilingual source base, she works to show how Bulgarians negotiated missionary overtures, invariably to their own ends. In chapter 2, for example, one young Bulgarian woman's decision to convert helped her resist the authority of her parents and of the Orthodox Church, while setting off a fierce contest between missionary and local Bulgarian schools in which domestic discourse was mobilized both for and against mission education. In chapter 3, new Bulgarian women's associations of the 1870s took inspiration from American missionary writings on women's education and national progress, even as they reconfigured Protestant ideals to suit Orthodox ends. Chapter 4 traces the origins of the Bulgarian Evangelical Association, founded by three Bulgarian pastors.

These episodes are not mere backdrops. Throughout the book we learn a great deal about local Ottoman politics, including varied streams of Bulgarian nationalism. This story will likely be new to many readers, as most treatments of missionary exchange in the Ottoman Empire have focused not on Bulgarians but on Maronite, Coptic, and Armenian Orthodox communities. These treatments of Bulgarian agency, while fascinating and evocative, do not compare with the richness of Reeves-Ellington's accounts of missionary lives. And in purely narrative terms, the drivers of this study—the people and forces that set the wheels of history in motion—tend to be American. When Bulgarian women form associations devoted to “maternal care” or speak out in favor of women's education, for instance, the most prominent reference points seem to be Protestant missionary periodicals and prescriptive literature; the chief inspiration seems to come, however circuitously, from New England. Yet one wonders about other sources of Bulgarian women's thinking about home, family, and nation. Reeves-Ellington gives evidence that Bulgarian women also looked to Europe for inspiration and comparison, but does not pursue this thread. Local sources of domestic ideology could also be plumbed further, or at least featured prominently in the narrative. All this is not to doubt the significance of American influences, of course, but to ask for richer contextualization and perhaps greater self-consciousness about the way that transnational historians narrate “encounters” between the United States and “the World.”

The book achieves much on this score. In the end, however, its greatest (and most riveting) contribution is its portrayal of the way individual American women negotiated gendered opportunities and constraints within the missionary field. This theme, which runs throughout the book, culminates in the fifth and final chapter, which details the founding and transformation of the Constantinople Home, later the American College for Girls, from a proselytizing institution to an independent American liberal arts college on the Bosporus. Reeves-Ellington shows how women missionaries, keen to serve the educational needs of local families of all faiths, collided with both the institutional authority of their male counterparts and the moral authority of the Woman's Board of Missions. The creative fundraising and institution building that followed these clashes will look familiar to anyone who has studied the work of Jane Addams and the settlement movement, well known for catapulting women from domestic spaces into the world of urban politics. Reeves-Ellington is interested in a similar process, and her book concludes with a fascinating discussion of “feminist Christian internationalism,” a force frequently overlooked in histories of transnational feminism and early twentieth-century reform. Thanks to this study, it is certain to receive the further attention it deserves.