To write the history of global Christianity is to trace the processes of its globalisation. The first volume of Brill’s History of global Christianity, European and global Christianity (2017), sketched these processes from the Reformation up to the French Revolution in ten chapters. The third and final instalment (2018) will take global Christianity into the twentieth century. Volume two begins in 1789 and goes up to the start of the First World War, adhering to the same structure of ten chapters that, by and large, each cover a different part of the globe. This book rightly abandons the boundaries of the long nineteenth century in chapters where other chronologies are more suitable: the Russian chapter, for example, begins in the early 1700s and ends in 1917. As the middle child of the series, it has the lofty task of giving a comprehensible account of the dynamics of nineteenth-century globalisation in Christianity. In its foreword, the editors lay out the threads that draw the chapters together: the ‘dynamics of modernity and Christianity’ (p. viii), Christian churches’ relationships with emerging nation states, and an increase in mission. In that respect, this volume beckons comparison with the eighth volume in The Cambridge History of Christianity series, World Christianities, c.1815–1914 (2006), which took precisely these three themes as its structuring principles. There, the result was a ‘well-trodden path of Western Christian predominance’,Footnote ¹ but its thematic clusters offered the reader a useful framework with which to navigate its 36 chapters. That guidance is largely missing in History of Christianity in the 19th century.

Unlike its Cambridge counterpart, however, this book does cover considerably more ground, for instance by including the Orthodox Churches. At a granular level, the volume would have benefitted from a thematic approach in which different Christianities in their various geographical and cultural contexts could nonetheless be analysed as global in their diversity. As it stands, though written expertly by an all-star list of scholars of nineteenth-century Christianity, most chapters suffer from relative isolation—they do not interact with one another but sometimes do overlap. It is perhaps unfair to take issue with the composition of a handbook that wields such an expansive scope, but with every chapter taking as its subject a delineated geographical unit, the volume gives a fragmented impression. This could have been helped had the editors chosen greater diversity among the volume’s authors: as it stands, eight out of eleven contributors are men from American and Western European universities.

Individually, chapters provide concise, thorough, and often original overviews of regional developments, but build few bridges to other regions. A thematic introduction that sets out the parameters of research emphases in the different chapters is vital, but is for the most part missing here. Nor is there a clear attempt at connecting them in Hugh McLeod’s sweeping introduction. This is an important stumbling block, also because terminology matters: if, as the editors contend, the nineteenth century is the era in which Christianity became ‘global’, then it would have been valuable to interweave, compare, and contrast the diverse directions Christianity took, also within individual chapters. Now, it is not always clear how chapters contribute to a syncretic study of globalising Christianities, nor how trends of a Christendom on the defence in its European ‘heartlands’, as the first two chapters outline, corresponded with the energetic ‘evangelization of the world in this generation’, in the words of the American missionary statesman John R. Mott (quoted in the introduction, p. xv).

Each chapter is self-sufficient in its delivery. After the first two chapters the reader leaves the political revolutions, nationalisms, and ultramontanism of Europe. Chapter three gives a clear overview of Protestant mission; chapter four looks at the developments within the Russian Orthodox Church, and, tellingly, situates its transformations within Russia in a framework of moves toward cultural westernisation. Chapter five crosses to North America, including Canada, and hones in on the complexities of religious tolerance and evangelicalism. A surprisingly short sixth chapter focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, with tentative links to European developments. Chapter seven takes the whole African continent as its subject. Chapter eight moves to the cradle of Christianity, the Middle East, and goes up to 1917. Chapter nine tackles Asia. These chapters advance quickly, sometimes at the cost of maintaining an overview. The last chapter begins to connect the dots by looking at Christianity’s relations to other religions. Frustratingly, this is the most challenging chapter of the book, hinting at the value of writing nineteenth-century religious history in terms of ‘interweaving different geographical regions and the emergence of new discursive spaces’ (p. 302) and processes of cultural negotiation.

Seen as a whole, these chapters nonetheless make clear that globalisation did not equate to a McDonaldization of Christianity. Across five continents, Christianity reinvented itself in this period: it adopted and adapted, survived and thrived, diversified and specialised. The book covers a wide array of ‘Christian subjects’, from education to devotional practices, and harbours a wealth of terms, (indexed) names and (indexed) places. Several infelicities reappear throughout: from minor grammatical errors and typos, to stylistic incongruities (‘19th century’ versus ‘nineteenth century’, sometimes within the same chapter), to some errors in the maps that accompany chapters. Chapter two, on European ultramontanism, is incorrectly given a map of the Russian Empire; the map of colonial Africa lists the Spanish territories as Portuguese. More fundamentally, maps risk presenting the dynamic complexities of globalisation as static and simple.Footnote ² Footnotes are limited, and every chapter has a short bibliography.

Despite these shortcomings, this is an important book because of its ambition to present an international, if not ‘global’, overview. As Kevin Ward rightly points out in the chapter on Africa, by 1900 Christianity may have become global, but in many parts of the world, Christianity, despite its missionary zeal and revivalist momentum, was still a religion of minorities. At its core, History of Christianity in the 19th century remains a fairly classical re-treading of older historiographical paths that lead through the Christian nineteenth century, which will be a useful scholarly introduction for students of history and religion and a valid work of reference for researchers.