Papers presented at a conference held at the Rockefeller Foundation Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in August 2000. This project on "Altruism and imperialism" was initiated by the Middle East Institute of Columbia University. Includes bibliographical references. Contents: 1. The missionary enterprise in the nineteenth century : an overview / Andrew Porter -- 2. On doing much with little noise : early encounters of Protestant missionaries in Lebanon / Samir Khalaf -- 3. The case of the curse : the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, and the Jews of Baghdad / Reeva Spector Simon -- 4. Neither conspiracy nor hypocrisy : the Jesuits and the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon / Elizabeth Thompson -- 5. Masking the mission : cultural conversion at the American College for Girls / Carolyn Goffman -- 6. Some remarks on Alevi responses to the missionaries in Eastern Anatolia (19th-20th centuries) / Hans-Lukas Kieser -- 7. Trouble wherever they went : American missionaries in Anatolia and Ottoman Syria in the 19th century / Jeremy Salt -- 8. An 'extra legible illustration of the Christian faith' : medicine, medical ethics, and missionaries in the Arabian Gulf / Eleanor Doumato -- 9. Missions and architecture : colonial and post-colonial views : the case of Palestine / Ruth Kark -- 10. Modernity's mission : evangelical efforts to discipline the nineteenth century Coptic community / Paul Sedra -- 11. Onward Christian soldiers : Presbyterian missionaries and the ambiguous origins of American relations with Iran / Michael Zirinsky -- 12. Syrian Muslim attitudes toward foreign missionaries in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries / Mahmoud Haddad -- 13. Overlapping modernities : from Christian missionary to Muslim reform schooling in Egypt / Linda Herrera -- 14. Faith of our fathers : Near East Relief and the Near East Foundation : from mission to NGO / Eleanor H. Tejirian.