This remarkable volume shows very well the ways in which, from the middle of the eighteenth century, diverse manifestations of networked religion sowed the seeds of today's global civil society. With the sort of contemporaneous treatment on offer here, we see a story of mutual imbrications and parallels, of how diverse systems of belief were recast as elements of a cosmopolitan order, contested at times by state actors or those who longed for outside powers that could act as guarantors for their traditions and programmes. Overseeing fifteen deftly edited contributions, Vincent Green and Abigail Viaene demonstrate how – after activating trading and philanthropic networks to call for reform or the protection of minorities abroad, or else to gather to protest obvious outrages against their coreligionists (however strictly they held to their tenets) – print propagandists ensured that their religions were henceforth envisioned as globalized networks of common sentiment whose adherents were the individual subjects and makers of modernity.

After an excellent introduction by the editors, Christopher Clark and Michael Ledger-Lomas take us on a journey with the perhaps paradigmatic Protestant international, whose missionary networks outlasted the colonial states on which they sometimes depended and even represented. Green then tracks the emergence of a highly contested, and often lay-dominated, Jewish public sphere from 1840, while Viaene offers insights into how the Catholic international of the nineteenth century was both revived and arguably Westernized from below (and in uncertain hope of the resurrection of the Vatican). Francis Robinson treads well-worn ground on the interactions between Muslims in the subcontinent, from traditionalist Sufis to the reformists acting under Western power. Simon Dixon paints an engaging picture of the vicissitudes of the Russian orthodox community's outpost in the Holy Land in the nineteenth century, whose official agents felt ever threatened by their Catholic and Protestant rivals and by half-hearted allies of other national rites. Amira Bennison reflects on the proto-nationalism and concomitant internationalism of the Cairo-based Muslim reformists who urged the umma to reject sectarianism and forestall the ever-increasing colonization of their lands. Yaron Tsur moves along the coast of North Africa, showing both the competition and the collaboration that played out between secularist and traditionalist Jewish educationalists with reference to self-declared internationals centred in the West. In time these choices would transform into destinations for emigration. Adam Yuet Chau then looks at the imaginings and enactments of transnational Buddhism under the aegis of Japanese scholars exposed to orientalist scholarship still coming to terms with the legacy of the Buddha, whose fruits would briefly flower in colonial Taiwan, Korea, and China.

Even if it is not specifically addressed in all the essays, colonialism looms large in much of the book. As a consequence, the final third is mostly devoted to the new horizons and paradoxical limitations of the post-colonial modern world, albeit with some backtracking, and much as earlier authors felt free to extend well beyond the limits of the early twentieth century. William Clarence-Smith traces the lineaments of the Hadrami diaspora across the Indian Ocean arena until the 1930s, while Paschallis Kitromilides details the testy relations between the component churches of an Orthodox world now being remade in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jonathan Dekel-Chen revisits the Jewish international for the century after 1880, while James Kennedy does the same for the Protestant form that rose most spectacularly in the 1950s and ’60s and then fell, either embracing the language of human rights or else returning to so many parochial roots. The volume is brought to a close with R. Scott Appleby's treatment of the Catholic Church beyond Vatican II, while Christoph Jaffrelot and Ingrid Therwath comment on the political iterations of contemporary transnational Hinduism.

Obviously there is a lot to take in here, yet it comes together very much as the editors might have hoped, and hence I will follow inspiration below rather than detail every argument advanced. First, it is noteworthy throughout how many internationals coalesced in eastern Europe or with reference to what was once called the Eastern Question, and were then played out with reference to international communism and its decline. I was particularly struck by Dixon on Orthodox communities in the Holy Land and Viaene on the parlous political state of the Vatican at the end of the nineteenth century. For, while one can make comparisons of the treatment and rivalries of various sects on sacred ground, it is apparent that the political capitals of Rome, Istanbul, and even Moscow were not so much dictating as reacting to the demands of their constituents (and even funders) abroad. In this sense it is worth noting that recent research has shown that the Ottoman policy of pan-Islamism that took shape under Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909), and in quest of shoring up the defences against Tsarist Russia, was one that reacted to requests from well outside the bounds of empire – whether from Southeast Asians resisting Buddhist Thais or the Dutch, or even the concerned faithful of Cape Town in the 1860s and then of the southern Philippines in the 1910s. Such believers, increasingly linked by print, and alive to the salience of the Russo-Turkish and then Russo-Japanese wars, would eventually read of attacks on one global umma in the twentieth century, accounts long centred on Jerusalem and the oppression of the Palestinian people before Afghanistan and Iraq took centre stage.

Such stories of the increasing sense of simultaneous suffering are arguably key to the transcendence and replications of the non-Christian blocks that first took their assigned places at the Christian-dominated World's Parliaments of Religions from the 1890s and that equally transformed into international non-governmental organizations in the post-colonial era. At the same time, we need to think more about the ways in which practices were similar and yet suspect. One can point to instances of success and familiarity breeding contempt. Some elite enthusiasts for Russian Palestine, for example, were clearly distressed by the rural and messianic quality of many of their pilgrims to a land that few believed lay in Ottoman territory (just as many Javanese imagined that the Dutch queen ruled with the Ottoman sultan's blessing). Writing on global Sufi networks with a strong South Asian focus, Robinson might also have considered how such processes as the concentration on the figure of the mediating shaykh might be compared to the nineteenth-century Catholic cults of the Cross or the Sacred Heart – movements that invited criticism from rival groupings within their respective slices of the transnational order that was so newly aware of nations.

Of course any edited volume has imbalances. The last third loses some of the pace set early on, and perhaps misses the opportunity to bring home fully how religious internationals were often shaped with conscious reference to each other and continued to eye the ever-shifting world map as a collection of territories to be acquired rather than peoples to be shared. There is also a preponderance of chapters dealing with ‘religions of the book’ (a phrase taken from Islamic parlance), though it should be recalled that the modern insistence on scripture as a defining characteristic of real religion is largely a function of the nineteenth-century (Protestant) repackaging of faiths. One might have wanted a more extended treatment of the curious interactions between members of the Theosophist movement and Buddhists in Sri Lanka, or of the global pretensions of Japanese Buddhists that would serve as a useful matrix for some advocates of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Even so, these are less lacunae to be regretted than further openings to be explored, for this book succeeds in so many areas, particularly in pointing out the importance of women (lay and in orders) in the shaping of their communities, and is presented with a lightness of touch that whets the appetite for more. Doubtless this project will have an impact on the writings of its constituent authors, and we can look forward, I think, to even richer studies to come.