This collection of essays on Protestant missions is a welcome corrective to the imbalance towards Anglophone missions discernible in much recent writing. It also exemplifies the increasing prominence in this field of scholarship by female historians. Seven of the twelve contributors are Scandinavian, and nine are women. The essays cover Norwegian, German, British, American and Canadian missionary efforts, and as well as more familiar territories such as West and South Africa, feature less frequently studied fields such as Tibet, Madagascar, Armenia and Urmia (Iran). Some of these case studies throw up themes recognisable to historians of other examples of missionary-colonial interactions: for example, French colonial rule in Madagascar essentialised ethnic divisions and identities, much as British rule did in Africa, whilst mission activity in Urmia helped to forge concepts of Assyrian ‘nationhood’. The editors have done their best to identify common themes connecting the essays. Probably the most important of these is represented by the three valuable contributions that focus on the shift in the course of the twentieth century from a strongly evangelistic understanding of the purpose of mission towards a humanitarian emphasis on development. In some areas this shift began to appear after the First World War. Inge Okkenhaug describes how a Norwegian missionary, Bodil Biørn, alongside missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, became involved in relief efforts among Armenian refugees and orphans in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. As early as 1919 Near East Relief, a non-confessional but Christian-influenced organisation established in the United States to work among the refugees, set out a seven-stage programme of activity from ‘rescue’ to ‘self-support’ which anticipated later development orthodoxy. Deborah Gaitskell similarly shows how a longer-lasting NGO founded after the war, the Save the Children Fund, was dependent on missionary input for its campaign on behalf of the rights of African children. A later and more comprehensive transmutation of mission into development is analysed in Ruth Compton Brouwer's illuminating study of the overseas work of the United Church of Canada in the 1960s, which reacted to the postcolonial crisis by virtually abandoning any concept of mission as a call to conversion. These case studies are not integrated by the editors into an overall interpretation of how missions in the course of the twentieth century responded to both political and theological change, but they point the way towards further research. There are oddities and unfortunate errors which closer editorial control could have eliminated. Three chapters have bibliographies, whereas the remainder do not. There are loose references on p. 60 to ‘the Scottish Presbyterian Church’ (which one?) and ‘the Scottish Missionary Society’ (no such entity existed in the 1890s), whilst the London Missionary Society is incorrectly described as Anglican (p. 108). Some of the essays are saturated with postcolonial theory to dubious advantage. Lisbeth Mikaelsson informs us that ‘Modern mission is an acculturation of Christianity in a Western thrust for global domination’ (p. 88), though she qualifies this generalisation by an admission that this cannot ‘fully explain the role of idealistic motivation, faith, and pious dedication’. Indeed it cannot.