Building American Institutions Abroad: American Expatriates as Informal Diplomats in the Late 19th Century

This paper will demonstrate how the establishment of permanent institutions by American expatriates in the nineteenth-century represented early outposts of U.S. empire. It will analyze why expatriate communities founded permanent local institutions that marked their American identity in multiple ways. I will examine the nineteenth century phenomenon and development of American missionary-established educational bodies in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the missionaries who created these schools, such as Daniel Bliss who established the Syrian Protestant College, the predecessor of American University of Beirut; and Cyrus Hamlin who set up Robert College in Istanbul. The paper will also explore the Americans who established the first overseas research centers such as Charles McKim who created the American Academy in Rome and William Goodwin, the first director of the American School for Classical Studies in Athens. Examining these educational institutions and their American faculty and staff reveals the novel diplomatic actors who shaped U.S. foreign relations in the late nineteenth century.