Shop the World: The Benevolent Supremacy of Missionary Consumer Citizenship

This paper unearths a history of “socially responsible capitalism” among the U.S. missionaries who, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, established early entrepreneurship programs for women in the global south. Mining the archives of humanitarian relief and economic “self help” projects sponsored by Mennonite missionaries working in Puerto Rico and Palestine, it shows how these midcentury efforts helped to naturalize a hope that transnational markets could provide a theater for feminist, anti-racist solidarities across borders. What began as a project to help fellow parishioners “love the poor in obedience to Christ’s teachings”—practiced in this case as teaching them crafts skills and then creating markets for their wares—would over the next forty years grow into the pioneering fair trade brand Ten Thousand Villages. I document this specific transformation, locating it at the historical nexus of U.S. benevolent supremacy, the emergence of a consumer’s republic, and changing discourses of race liberalism. This paper complicates the tendency among historians of capitalism to emphasize the role of the evangelical Christian right in the rise of capitalism. Instead, it finds the racial and economic groundwork for neoliberal market discipline in the very actors who sought, through their consumer choices, to counteract the most devastating effects of free market coercion and military occupation.