This lecture is based on work in progress on evangelical Protestant mission networks that linked India and the US, from the early 19^th century forward. These linkages were materialized not only in the circulation of persons, but in periodicals, books and pamphlets, and in the performed spaces of conferences and expositions staged in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. I am especially interested in the pictorial representations (e.g., photographs, lithographs, engravings, postcards), that circulated within those networks and the cultural work that they performed.  These are “moving pictures” on two different, but interrelated registers.  On one hand, the pictures “travel” within mass cultural media (e.g., as illustrations) and as objects of gift and exchange between missionaries.  On the other hand, they also make affective claims on viewers, “moving” them spiritually, emotionally and pragmatically.  These images and their distribution help constitute a global “imaginary” (following Charles Taylor) – one that fashioned that global by affixing moral boundaries on territorial and cultural spaces.  Building on Benedict Anderson’s argument that nationalism rested on the senses of simultaneity imparted by the newspaper and the novel, I propose that the evangelical global imaginary rested on the transcultural simultaneity enabled by the entangled histories of mission and mass mediation and found further expression in the evangelical conferences and expositions of the late 19^th and early 20^th  century.   These, in turn, set the stage for the forms of international humanitarian endeavor that Ian Tyrrell dubbed America’s “moral empire.”

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