Scholarship on Christian missions and the British empire has proliferated with extraordinary abundance over the last two decades, but, in comparison, the efforts which Anglicans, Catholics, Scottish and Irish Presbyterians and English Nonconformists alike devoted to sending priests and ministers to work among the settler population of the white colonies have been largely neglected. It is this topic – rather than any broader consideration of religion and colonialism – that forms the subject of Hilary Carey's large and impressively researched book. A variety of societies, from well-known bodies such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to less familiar ones such as the Congregationalist Colonial Missionary Society, sought to provide the men and the funds to meet the needs of the settlers. The backcloth to Carey's story is the gathering flood of emigration from Britain to the colonies, which reached its peak between 1850 and 1900, when more than 7 million people left for the colonies. Of this total a disproportionate number were Irish or Scots, so both the Irish Catholic diaspora (most notably to Australia) and the Scottish Presbyterian diaspora to Canada and Otago in New Zealand feature prominently in the narrative. Another major theme is the contrasting implications of the colonial context for the nature of Anglican and Presbyterian identities. Both denominations had to adjust to the harsh realities of voluntaryism, but they did so in divergent fashion. In Canada the clergy reserves were secularised in 1854, effectively disestablishing both the Anglican and the Presbyterian Churches in Canada. Synodical government became a feature of Anglican governance, pioneered by Bishop Selwyn in New Zealand from 1859, making Anglicans a little more like Presbyterians, yet the Anglican Churches in the British colonies continued to denominate themselves as part of a greater Church of England for a Greater Britain, rather than taking the American option of styling themselves as Episcopalians. Scottish Presbyterians, by contrast, from the beginning styled their colonial Churches as ‘Presbyterian’ rather than as overseas branches of the Church of Scotland or (after 1843) the Free Church of Scotland. They hence moved more rapidly than the colonial Anglican Churches to independence of Britain, and more readily developed links with Methodists and Congregationalists, thus paving the way for the church unions formed in Canada in 1925 and Australia in 1977. In the Catholic Church, the most significant aspect of Carey's narrative is the way in which Cardinal Cullen, ‘the uncrowned pope of greater Britain’, used his colonial influence to secure a global power-base for a strongly ultramontane Irish interpretation of Catholicism. In a book as wide-ranging as this one, it is perhaps inevitable that there are some slips. The most notable is the surprising statement that John Keble and Edward Pusey departed for Rome in 1845–6 (p. 166). But this is a fine book that will set the parameters of scholarship on the ecclesiastical history of the settler colonies for decades to come.