Identity and Representation among American Missionaries and Merchants in the Near East, 1810–60

This paper discusses my study of the interaction among American missionaries, opium traders, diplomats and the diverse peoples of the Levant through the mid-nineteenth century. The opium exporting system in Smyrna, a port city of the Ottoman Empire (now called Izmir), dominated locally by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, provided important relationships and centered the activities of both American merchants and missionaries. Turks and other Muslims generally were excluded from or otherwise did not participate in the opium trade in the city, a reticence that Americans upon arriving found to be surprising. The trade relationships that Americans developed shaped and limited inter-cultural relationships between Americans and others. Little attention has been paid to how these expatriated “Americans” thought of themselves amid peoples very different from those in their largely New England origins. This paper argues that missionaries and merchants did not begin to identify or see themselves as citizens of the United States until the 1840s. Before that, they saw themselves as dual agents of commercial philanthropy, and therefore part of either regional or transnational communities that were not dependent on or defined by U.S. sovereignty and citizenship. The paper will further argue that the Levantine peoples, likewise, did not identify missionaries and merchants as “American” over the period. Americans in Smyrna were exiles from prevailing or developing notions of American identity; locals considered them to be western, or foreign, rather than citizens of the United States, and the Americans identified themselves according to transnational and/or regional understandings that were separate from American sovereignty and nationality.