“Providential openings point the way,” wrote Thomas Haweis in 1797, expressing the enthusiasm of a new generation of mission organizers (43). The performance of current missions was deemed unsatisfactory, and the rapidly expanding British Empire seemed to reflect both divine favor and divine responsibility. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vast array of missionary enterprises sprang up to answer the call. In all cases their operations were associated with Western power. As Andrew Porter reminds us, however, their activities cannot be reduced down to power-serving motives. Missionary lives were entangled with empire but grounded in theology, containing metaphysical dimensions far beyond the structures of colonial discourse or capitalist economics.

Porter's redoubtable expertise, empirical depth, and clear prose have given us the most comprehensive overview of this subject to date. Unlike most recent publications on missions, this book moves well beyond the high imperialism of the later nineteenth century. Strong chapters on the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries set the Victorian story in context and provide valuable ammunition for Porter's principal narrative: the creation and expansion of international missionary networks. This was not merely a story of British colonialism. The “Great Awakening” in early nineteenth-century America forged its own mission imperatives, and these shared substantial theological, geographical, and personal ground with their British counterparts.

One of the greatest strengths of this book lies in its attention to missionaries as human beings whose backgrounds included intermarrying missionary clans, international correspondents, and an array of personal interests including science. Once in the field, gender relations, sexuality, clothing, housing, food, and medicine were all subject to tensions between metropolitan norms and local conditions. What remained central, however, was Christianity. Amid so much recent talk of textual interpellations, imbrications, and other literary maneuvres in missionary writing, one can lose sight of missionaries as living people of faith. Porter pays very welcome critical attention to their denominations, theological reading, and soul-searching. He reminds us that little is straightforward about the resulting views of Western expansionism. By the later nineteenth century, several High Church Anglican missions reflected Christian Socialist critiques of capitalist inequality. Far from being leaders (or even puppets) of imperialism, such missions were keen to protect indigenous peoples from the ravages of modern Western “civilization.” The horrors of the First World War only enhanced the urgency of such views. Nevertheless, the same missions also featured a paternalistic idealization of indigenous tradition and ecclesiological obsessions that hampered indigenous leadership. It is impossible to understand what is in a missionary's texts unless you also understand what is in his (or her) daily prayers, and why.

Authors working comparatively must inevitably concentrate on some issues and regions at the expense of others. The Pacific world is routinely marginalized in studies of British missions, and this book is no exception. Its Pacific material is drawn from a haphazard and largely outdated selection of secondary sources, whereas the African material is solidly based on Porter's own researches and his familiarity with current debates in the field. Indeed, the contribution of Religion versus Empire? to non-African debates is undercut by the book's historiographical location. Porter argues convincingly against the view of missionaries as colonial functionaries. Recent scholarship has revealed complex local responses to Christianity that cannot be reduced to an all-powerful Western colonialism. Here Porter pays particular attention to the postcolonial anthropology of Jean and John Comaroff in their studies of Christianity in southern Africa, joining the critique of their concept of the colonization of consciousness. Studies of British-based attitudes and networks receive shorter shrift, however. Kathleen Wilson, Susan Thorne, and Catherine Hall have raised important questions about missions and empire that “deserve further consideration at length and in their own right,” especially where the issues of race and gender are concerned. Nevertheless, they are not addressed here “in a work of a different kind” (8).

It remains unclear why Porter felt unable to engage with these interventions directly. Missionary identities and projects inevitably blur the distinction between empire “out there” and empire “at home.” Postcolonial scholars often speak of “trafficking” across disciplinary boundaries, and Porter expresses the admirable aim of bridge building between the traditionally distinct fields of British domestic history, British imperial history, and the national histories of various parts of the former British Empire. Nevertheless, a curious sense of gatekeeping remains. I have seen too many thesis proposals and dissertations on British missions that meticulously cite literary and critical theory, and the work of Wilson, Thorne and Hall, while taking no notice of Porter's voluminous publications. Porter's bridging metaphor itself points to intellectual realms that he still regards as separate, as “work of a different kind.” Too many scholarly worlds remain divided by their common research interests.

Porter's central argument remains both convincing and provocative: traditional preoccupations with colonialism fail to acknowledge both indigenous power and the relative lack of power wielded by missionaries in local communities. The resulting paradox generated anticolonialism in many mission circles and powerfully challenged scientific racism. It is already difficult for the familiar “colonialism-only” functionalism to hold its ground; Porter's work will make it harder still. The “missionary position” on colonialism, it seems, owes more to academic needs than to the complex lives and identities of missionaries themselves.