Acknowledgements
This volume is one of the results of a EFR international project, MisSMO (Christian missions and societies in the Middle East: organizations, identities, heritagization—19th–20th centuries) in collaboration with NWO (The Dutch Research Council) research project (Dec. 2017– Dec. 2022) CrossRoads—European Cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918–1948). A connected History. We would like to thank EFR, IFAO, IFPO, IREMAM, LARHRA, and NWO for financing part of this research project, as well as the EFR for its support of the international workshop where some of the papers for this book were first presented and discussed.
We are grateful to many colleagues in Rome, Paris, Leiden, Jerusalem, London, Manchester, Beirut, Cairo and elsewhere who, through their contributions to the conference, the workshop and through extended email conversations helped us to flesh out our questions and approaches.
We would also like to thank Sarah Irving for her invaluable work while copy editing the manuscript. Other scholars took up our invitation to discuss our ideas and findings with us. We heartily thank them all for their stimulating engagement with our project.
Finally, we thank the colleagues who contributed to this volume in particular, those who published, and those who, for various reasons, could not write but contributed to our discussions during the amazing first year of COVID-19.