Recent work on the history of migration and the Atlantic World has underscored the importance of the political economies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the impact of these exchanges on political relations and state-building, and on economic structures, commerce, and wealth. Too little of this work explores culture and identity outside the Anglo-American context, especially as reflected through religious developments of radical Pietists and other Germans, the second largest group of migrants to the American colonies in the eighteenth century.

This volume offers a fresh vantage point from which to examine the Atlantic World. Quick to traverse the conventional political boundaries that divided European states and American colonies, Moravians departed their homeland to form new congregations in the most cosmopolitan European cities as well as on the North American frontier. Pious Pursuits explores the lives and beliefs of Atlantic World Moravians, as well as their communities and culture, and it provides a new framework for analysis of the Atlantic World that is comparative and transnational.

Recent work on the history of migration and the Atlantic World has underscored the importance of the political economies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the impact of these exchanges on political relations and state-building, and on economic structures, commerce, and wealth. Too little of this work explores culture and identity outside the Anglo-American context, especially as reflected through religious developments of radical Pietists and other Germans, the second largest group of migrants to the American colonies in the eighteenth century.

This volume offers a fresh vantage point from which to examine the Atlantic World. Quick to traverse the conventional political boundaries that divided European states and American colonies, Moravians departed their homeland to form new congregations in the most cosmopolitan European cities as well as on the North American frontier. Pious Pursuits explores the lives and beliefs of Atlantic World Moravians, as well as their communities and culture, and it provides a new framework for analysis of the Atlantic World that is comparative and transnational.

List of abbreviations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: THE BIRTH OF MORAVIANISM: CONFESSION AND CULTURE

Chapter 1. Imperial communities
Mack Walker

Chapter 2. Manuscript missions in the age of print: Moravian community in the Atlantic world
Robert Beachy

Chapter 3. Deep in the side of Jesus: The persistence of Zinzendorfian piety in colonial America
Craig D. Atwood

Chapter 4. Moravian physicians and their medicine in colonial North America: European models and colonial reality
Renate Wilson

PART II: MORAVIAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY: IDENTITY AND ASSIMILATION

Chapter 5. Fashion passion: The rhetoric of dress within the eighteenth-century Moravian brethren
Elisabeth Sommer

Chapter 6. New birth in a new land: evangelical culture and the creation of an American identity
S. Scott Rohrer

Chapter 7. "Commerce that the Lord could sanctify and bless": Moravian participation in transatlantic trade, 1740–1760
Katherine Carté Engel

Chapter 8. Piety and profit: Moravians in the North Carolina backcountry market, 1770–1810
Emily Conrad Beaver

Chapter 9. Moravians, the market and a new order in Salem
Michael Shirley

PART III: RACE AND GENDER IN THE MORAVIAN CHURCH: A PROTESTANT EXCEPTIONALISM?

Chapter 10. "No one should lust for power... women least of all.": Dismantling female leadership among eighteenth-century Moravians
Beverly P. Smaby

Chapter 11. The role of the pastor’s wife in the pioneering generation of protestant German-speaking clergy in the American colonies
Marianne S. Wokeck

Chapter 12. Unlikely sisters: Cherokee and Moravian women in the early nineteenth-century
Anna Smith

Chapter 13. Moravian missions in times of emancipation: Conversion of slaves in Surinam during the nineteenth-century
Ellen Klinkers

Chapter 14. Slavery, race, and the global fellowship: Religious radicals confront the modern age
Jon Sensbach

Chapter 15. Conclusion: Moravians and the challenge of writing global history of Diasporic Christianity
A. G. Roeber

Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index