‘Everything in the empire is tinged for the present with [the] Church’, Henry Cockburn wrote in his journal on 30 May 1837 – ‘hence the importance of the proceedings of the General Assembly’. While recent scholarship often presents the Church of England as the dominant religious player in the nineteenth-century British Empire, Valerie Wallace's monograph reminds us of another imperial religious network, one which increasingly defined itself against Anglican imperialism. Her point of departure is the movement of two million Scots into the British Empire during the nineteenth century, exporting the complex ecclesiastical loyalties and antipathies which engrossed Cockburn. The leaning of Presbyterian settlers to colonial reform was especially marked when they were dissenters from the Kirk and would be reinforced by the 1843 Disruption. Jealous as they were of the Kirk's spiritual autonomy, they disliked Anglican hegemony and sought to unpick it by unseating local elites or challenging undemocratic dictation from Westminster. Presbyterian ecclesiology was of course nothing if not divided and divisive and Wallace does not wish to posit a monolithic ‘radicalism’. She notes that Scottish radicals differed largely in their understanding of Church-State relations and that their objectives varied with their particular colonial settings. Nevertheless, whether in New Brunswick or New South Wales, the activities of Presbyterian Dissenters formed common and entangled patterns in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. This notably reflected a shared reading of authoritative texts. The Anti-Burgher writer Thomas McCrie emerges as the patron saint of this networked Scottish world. His histories of Scottish Reformers and Covenanters, which celebrated the struggle to establish the Kirk's spiritual independence, strengthened their resolve to obtain religious and political equality. His popularity is a reminder that nineteenth-century Britons advanced backwards into the future, their thoughts still running on early modern battles. It also highlights the importance of Seceder mythology in giving a spine to colonial radicalism. Presbyterians also converged in anger at haughty Anglican clergy and their allies in government, especially when they sought to monopolise education or withhold official recognition of Presbyterian marriages. Their actions united Presbyterians within colonies – a shared dislike of Archdeacon John Strachan made the 1837 rising in Upper Canada a ‘Scotch rebellion’ – but also across them. The writings of John Dunmore Lang – a Church of Scotland minister whose disappointments in New South Wales turned him into a voluntaryist and a republican – weighed with South African Presbyterians who had become keen supporters of the voluntaryist campaigns that finally triumphed in 1875. Wallace's book thus advances a convincing explanation of why counter-revolutionary attempts to build up the Church in the Empire were chequered and largely impermanent. Like the Roman Catholics whom Anglicans regarded as a more prominent threat, Scottish Presbyterian dissenters thought and worked globally. They were never likely to concede that the British Empire was synonymous with a greater England.