Tony Ballantyne's wide-ranging, energetic, and intellectually provocative writing has profoundly shifted debates in new imperial history and a cluster of cognate disciplines. In Entanglements of Empire, Ballantyne returns home to New Zealand for a deep reconsideration of key moments in the precolonial 1810s and 1820s. In particular, he illuminates encounters between Maori and British missionaries and explores the legacy of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, a foundational figure in the Church Missionary Society's efforts in the South Pacific.

Ballantyne's new book is not a national history, however. His forensic reconstruction of cross-cultural engagements from both Maori and Pakeha (white New Zealander) perspectives links the Bay of Islands in the North Island with the currents of evangelical, racial, and imperial thought that swept along the tides of empire. As they did in the Pacific Islands but not Australia, in New Zealand evangelical Protestant missionaries preceded formal annexation by the British (or other Europeans). New Zealand's ongoing connection with the Pacific is embedded in many societal facets—Samoa, the Cook Islands, and Niue were under New Zealand administration in the twentieth century, and substantial migration has led to a large Pacific population—but the links between religion, the state, and indigenous forms of Christianity are perhaps the most enduring and interesting aspects. These are the “webs of Empire” that fascinate Ballantyne in this book (compare his Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's Colonial Past [2012] and Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire [2002]). While here he centers on New Zealand histories, he also spans the latitude and longitude of both British and Pacific worlds of the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Missionaries are crucial, complex, and contradictory actors in British imperial history. Paying attention to this complexity has produced a raft of scholarship providing new insights into individual colonial locales and a range of influential comparative and metropolitan-focused studies. Entanglements of Empire joins the best of this work by paying attention to the specifics of the New Zealand mission field and, most importantly, to the Maori world that it encountered. Ballantyne's real originality lies in his reconstruction of a Maori cosmology, morality, and cultural system; the ways in which British evangelicalism interacted with and changed that system of thought; and the ways in which British evangelicalism was influenced and changed by Maori culture, customs, and philosophies. This is an outstanding achievement, the consequence of wide reading, deep imaginative thinking, and a commitment to Greg Dening's call for an ethnography and history of both sides of the frontier.

Ballantyne's focus on the body allows him to range broadly across contentious aspects of missions to the Maori: issues such as sexuality and marriage; labor and its re-ordering of time and space; violence, protection, and suffering; death and enfeeblement. These are familiar tropes for scholars reading various local missionary archives and contact zones, and more discussion of the predictability of such nodal points would be welcome. Here, though, and crucially, these questions play across both Maori and missionary bodies, and their multivalent meanings are traced across Maori and British systems of thought, feeling, and value. Ballantyne's subtle readings allow him to read across both the colonial archives and the ways in which subsequent scholarship has made use of key archival episodes. His reading of the transgressive missionary William Yate, for example (chapter 4) manages both to dispel quietly some of the more literal recuperative queer readings of Yate's career and appreciate the “productive anachronism” of Robert Aldrich's reading of Yate as a “coming out” case study (166). This is archival reinvigoration of the highest order: subtle, historically sensitive, and theoretically adept.

Entanglements of Empire was, according to Ballantyne's preface, a long time in preparation; this shows in its ambitious and thoughtful reconstruction of the Maori side of missionary encounters in particular. The weight of the archive always bears most strongly in favor of reconstructing white experiences in colonial encounters; Ballantyne makes very impressive claims to understanding the challenges that missionaries experienced as they necessarily accommodated indigenous philosophies, laws, and epistemologies. He argues compellingly for the Maori influence upon most missions in the early period prior to the 1830s, from local agriculture and trade to the choice of physical locations. Against missionary discourse of management and transformation, Ballantyne shows the reliance, if not dependence, upon Maori authorities necessary as missionaries staked a claim in a foreign land, without the buttress of a formal colonial architecture. In essence, Ballantyne argues, evangelism was “a project of cultural reform grounded in the vernacularisation of Christianity” (254). While missionaries imagined that translating and internalizing the Christian message would profoundly change the Maori, in fact these processes resulted in a profound change to colonial Christianity itself. Such productive “entanglements” are far from the fatal impact thesis of early scholars of colonialism in the Pacific, and they promise to open up new fields of research in similarly painstaking reconstructions of cross-cultural encounters in New Zealand, and further afield.