Networks are in fashion among historians of empire. In this excellent book Barry Crosbie examines those that the Irish made for themselves in British India, both during the times of the East India Company, and subsequently the Raj. Although he is not the first to cover this ground – S. B. Cook published a similar, if nearly unobtainable, book in 1993 – this will be the standard treatment for some time to come. Irish imperial networks considers different aspects of the Irish experience in India in detail, and in turn, from the Indian Civil Service, the medical corps, the armed forces and so forth. For ecclesiastical historians, the interest lies primarily in chapter v, where Crosbie turns his attention to the Churches. Or, rather, to the Roman Catholic Church – the varieties of Irish Protestantism have at best a walk-on role, despite the fact that the first Irish missionaries in India seem to have been Evangelical Protestants. (This is hardly unusual in studies of imperial Christianity, where Irish Protestants are all too often lost among their British co-religionists.) The British state – in all its Indian guises – had to confront multiple challenges where Catholicism was concerned: a not insignificant indigenous population; the long-established presence of a Portuguese hierarchy claiming ancient rights and essentially independent of the Holy See; and the simple fact that by the early nineteenth century no fewer than half of the East India Company's European soldiers were Irish Catholics. As elsewhere in the empire, Irish soldiers demanded Catholic priests, and preferably Irish ones. And, as elsewhere in the empire, the authorities provided – albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm – access and financial support for chaplains and eventually bishops: in 1834 the first Irish vicar apostolic, Daniel O'Connor, was appointed to Madras, at least in part because of parliamentary pressure placed on the Company by Daniel O'Connell. O'Connor's appointment began what would be nearly sixty years of Irish domination in Madras. Despite their horror of Maynooth-trained clerics, whom they unsuccessfully hoped to interdict, the British quickly found that Irish Catholicism was not as threatening as they had feared: the soldiers quieted down; the Irish were conspicuously uninterested in making native converts (something that was also true in the Cape and New Zealand), thus presenting less of a threat to India's fragile religious peace than, say, more enthusiastic British Baptists; and, perhaps most important, the Irish were citizens of the United Kingdom, and thus more politically reliable than the established Portuguese, let alone the French in Pondicherry. In a relatively short time Irish bishops were also appointed to Calcutta, Hyderabad and Bombay, and Irish priests, mostly from All Hallows College in Dublin, began to spread across the region. Crosbie tells this story with assurance, tracing the conflicts with the Portuguese and indigenous Catholics (who objected both to Irish sartorial habits and indifference to caste distinctions), and the Irish response in some detail, as well as the evolving attitudes of the British. What the Irish Catholic Church discovered in India was similar to what they found elsewhere: what amounted to a religious free market, despite residual (and loudly protested) state support for Anglicanism. And what they created in India, as elsewhere, was a distinctively Irish form of Roman Catholic worship and practice that has proved enduring. This is, of course, all ground that has been covered before, notably by Kenneth Ballhatchet in his Caste, caste, and Catholicism in India (1998) and numerous articles. Nor does Crosbie draw on any Indian and barely any Roman manuscript sources, relying instead on newspapers and the collections of the British Library and the English Jesuits as well as the near-contemporaneously published correspondence of All Hallows College (which he uses perhaps a bit too uncritically). There are one or two surprising interpretations of Irish history (for example, the off-hand characterisation of William Smith O'Brien and the Young Irelanders as ‘fenians’), and Crosbie could have made more of an effort at a comparative perspective: the Catholic Church was if nothing else international in outlook, and many places have a rich historiography on the Irish Catholic experience of empire in the same period. To take only one example, the first Irish bishop of Hyderabad, Daniel Murphy, was later translated to Tasmania where he made an important contribution to Australian religious history; one of his priests in India, Matthew Quinn, also became an influential Australian bishop. But these are quibbles: although the chapter devoted to ecclesiastical history offers specialists little that is new, Crosbie must be commended for incorporating religion into his story, and readers of the entire book will come away with a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the Irish and the Irish Catholic experience of empire in its most important theatre.