This vigorous and informative book adds a necessary dimension to the Routledge series on Christianity and Society in the Modern World by providing a perspective on the history of British missions in the last three hundred years. Jeffrey Cox, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, is fully aware of recent developments in the study of the relation between imperialism and missionary expansionism. Gone, he suggests, is the period when missionaries were treated by historians as largely marginal and even somewhat comic figures, or, by contrast, described in reverential terms by other missionary authors who treated their work largely in isolation from historical events. More recently missionaries have been regarded by some scholars as decidedly malignant, simply doing the ideological bidding of their colonial masters. (This tendency is alive and well in what have become known as ‘post-colonial studies’). However, recent studies have offered new insights into a more just and adequate assessment of how British missionary expansion, for example, related to the rise of British imperial power, and Cox takes account of these. Cox sees two master narratives coming into conflict here: first, the remarkable story of the spread of world-wide Christianity, and second, the missionary enterprise as a form of cultural imperialism. For Cox imperialism includes two aspects: the formal power of law: of the military and the police (together with slavery and its later substitute indentured servitude), and the diffused power of massive social, scholarly and religious inequality. A second theme running through the book is the contrast between two forms of British Christianity: the confessional and the voluntary. The first of these led mission agencies to organise institutions, notably schools, colleges and hospitals, in order to establish civilisational and cultural norms. The second form aimed primarily at gathering congregations made up of committed believers, and only when this was accomplished would the concern with larger structures and institutions arise. Cox deals with these different forms of mission in his first chapters under the general heading ‘The religious crisis of the British imperial state, 1700–1800’. Then follow three further sections: ‘Building a movement, 1800–1870’; ‘Imperial high noon, 1870–1945’; and ‘Post-colonial missions since 1945’. The last of these sections is very disappointing. It is just twenty pages long and privileges the North American church-growth theorist Donald McGavran and some examples of outreach into Great Britain by US-based evangelical mission agencies. Cox does not mention the ongoing work (although operating in a different key from earlier times) of the mainstream British Churches through the Conference for World Mission and its successor the Commission on Mission, nor the missionary impulses behind Christian Aid and Cafod with their large numbers of overseas workers. Cox clearly has eschewed any reading of post-1945 missiological literature other than McGavran: it would have been good if he had noted such seminal works as David Paton's Christian missions and the judgment of God (1952) or Elliott Kendall's End of an era (1978) and pointed us to such central ecumenical reports as The missionary obligation of the Church (1953) and Witness in six continents (1963). In his earlier sections, however, Cox is quite masterful in his ‘resolute determination to omit’ (the phrase is Stephen Neill's) and to paint with broad brush strokes. Among his many strengths is the recognition of the striking but often neglected fact that women have formed the greater part of the missionary force and, even more neglected, that most of the work of evangelism has been carried out by ‘native agents’, ‘catechists’ and ‘bible women’, all of whom were anonymous in missionary reporting and therefore ignored by previous historians. Painting with broad brush strokes does, however, allow errors to creep in. Sometimes these are minor: Philip Doddridge became interested in David Brainerd in the 1740s not the 1750s (p. 58); John Wesley's strange warming of the heart did not take place in a Moravian chapel (p. 62); Thomas Coke took very little part in the initial organisation of American Methodism, that achievement belongs almost exclusively to Francis Asbury (p. 64); William Wilberforce was Member of Parliament for Hull, not the whole of Yorkshire (p. 90) and so on. But sometimes more serious questions of interpretation arise. For this reviewer one of these is the question of precisely when the British missionary movement moved away from what Cox calls ‘the defamation of the “other”’. On p. 225 Cox writes that ‘with Richard, Andrews and Gairdner the missionary rhetoric of the early nineteenth century began to wane’, that is, we are led to suppose, around or after 1910. But Cox's broad brush misses Timothy Richard's break-up with the BMS in late 1888, after which Richard supported himself for a year as the editor of a North China newspaper. This significant separation was certainly caused by Richard's positive attitude towards Chinese culture for, as early as the 1880s, he was writing of the good that there was in Taoism and speaking of the ‘fulfillment’ of Buddhism in Christianity. C. F. Andrews had moved in the inner circles of the Cambridge theologian B. F. Westcott many years before he arrived in India and was imbued with Westcott's sense of ‘the progressive action of the Word’ in the world's religions, and of a ‘Divine plan in the education of the world’. Behind Westcott lay the towering contributions of F. D. Maurice whose Religions of the world and their relations to Christianity was published in 1846 marking the beginning of the end of the missionary ‘defamation’ of other religious traditions. Among those who carried forward this train of thought was T. E. Slater, an LMS missionary in India, not mentioned by Cox, who urged as early as 1876 that it was pointless to present Christianity as an ‘antagonistic Religion among the other Religions of the world’. Slater wrote a little later that Christian missionaries would never win India unless Indian religions were treated with ‘justice, courtesy and love’. That Slater's attitude was by no means unusual at the beginning of the twentieth century can be seen in the many responses of missionaries all over the world to the preparatory questionnaire of Commission Four of the WMC Edinburgh Conference: The missionary message in relation to non-Christian religions. The waning of defamatory missionary rhetoric had begun a long time before 1910.