S arah and Her Sisters: Letters, Emotions, and Colonial Identities in the Early Modern A tlantic World

This article uses letters by indigenous converts to explore how early modern M oravian missions in the A tlantic imagined themselves as emotional communities. M oravian missions were the most successful P rotestant mission enterprise in the A tlantic and established numerous missions across several empires and vastly different indigenous cultures. By comparing the letters from indigenous converts across the A tlantic rim ( N orth A merica, C aribbean and G reenland) I argue that indigenous people used the medium of the written letter to participate in an imagined emotional community of M oravians while at the same time they negotiated inescapable social and gendered differences in very specific colonial contexts.