This collection of essays attempts to engage with growing interest in the relationships between Churches in Ireland, the Irish diaspora and the British colonial project in the nineteenth century. It seeks to show how the education received at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) shaped the worldview of Church of Ireland clergymen and their contribution to colonial life. In their respective contributions, Alan Acheson, Thomas P. Power and Timothy Stunt offer a thought-provoking introduction to the theological curriculum offered at TCD in the nineteenth century and how, by the 1830s, the atmosphere became predominately Evangelical with a significant High Church tinge. These and other essays also suggest that the increasing challenges to Anglican privilege in Ireland during the 1820s and 1830s prompted many clergy to emigrate and provoked both High Church and Evangelical attempts to reenergise the Church. The former, exemplified by J. H. Todd and C. R. Elrington, sought to assert the Irish identity of their denomination through historical study, while Evangelicals engaged in various forms of religious activism.

Despite the quality of the individual contributions, this collection does not advance an overall argument about the divinity diaspora of TCD. There is little sense of how many Irish clergy immigrated to ‘the British world’ and some of the contributions do not discuss either the influence of TCD and/or the Church of Ireland diaspora. Some sense of the numbers involved can be found in Ann McCormick's excellent essay on the Irish clergy in England, while Michael Gladwin comes closest to identifying the distinctive contribution of Irish Anglicans in promoting what he calls ‘a liberal humane empire’ (p. 278) in Australia. Gladwin also notes the ‘significant theological diversity’ of the Irish clergy in Australia who included High Churchmen, Tractarians and Evangelicals. This raises the important of issue of how to label the Irish Anglican diaspora. A number of essays note the significance of the perceptions of outsiders that the Irish Church was staffed by ‘Calvinists’, ‘ultra-Protestants’ and ‘Orangemen’. These labels can be applied to many, but they obviously cannot be applied to the denomination as a whole. To what extent was the identity of Irish Anglicans overseas a product of the stereotypes held by others? There is also the question of the label ‘Evangelical’. This can refer to a party within the Church of Ireland, but it was also an interdenominational and international movement and a moderating theological position within global Protestantism. To what extent was the world described in this collection Irish or British, Anglican or Evangelical? Was the Irish Anglican diaspora, in fact, a combination of all of these elements – and others – that could vary in relative significance over time and space?