Reforming the world : the creation of Americas moral empire Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Mens Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home and explores the methods and networks used by reformers to fashion a global and nonterritorial empire. He follows the transnational American response to internal pressures the European colonies and dynamic changes in global society. Examining the cultural context of American expansionism from the 1870s to the 1920s Tyrrell provides a new interpretation of Christian and evangelical missionary work and he addresses Americas use of soft power. He describes evangelical reforms influence on American colonial and diplomatic policy emphasizes the limits of that impact and documents the often idiosyncratic personal histories aspirations and cultural heritage of moral reformers such as Margaret and Mary Leitch Louis Klopsch Clara Barton and Ida Wells. The book illustrates that moral reform influenced the United States as much as it did the colonial and quasi colonial peoples Americans came in contact with and shaped the architecture of American dealings with the larger world of empires through to the era of Woodrow Wilson. Investigating the wide reaching and diverse influence of evangelical reform movements Reforming the World establishes how transnational organizing played a vital role in Americas political and economic expansion. Book jacket pt. 1. Networks of empire Webs of communication Missionary lives transnational networks: the Misses Margaret and Mary Leitch pt. 2. Origins of American empire The missionary impulse The matrix of moral reform Blood souls and power: American humanitarianism abroad in the 1890s pt. 3. The challenge of American colonialism Reforming colonialism Opium and the fashioning of the American moral empire Ida Wells and others: radical protest and the networks of American expansion pt. 4. The era of World War I and the Wilsonian new world order States of faith: missions and morality in government To make a dry world: the new world order of prohibition Conclusion: The judgments of heaven: change and continuity in moral reform.