The new I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church series has quickly established an enviable reputation for impressive scholarship. This book is the sixth of seven volumes in the series, each written by leading scholars. David Hempton adopts a broad canvas. Despite the cover illustration of Canaletto's St Paul's Cathedral (1754) he ranges widely across the globe. This was, after all, the era in which Christianity as a global project was given its biggest boost. Not only in Europe and North America but in Latin America, India, China, South East Asia and Africa, Christianity spread in this period and laid down deep taproots. The empires of Holland, Spain, Portugal and later Britain were the instruments of that expansion. Consequently intercontinental Christianity crossed denominations and Hempton's book brilliantly reflects this, paying as much attention to Catholicism and Pietism as to Anglicanism and Methodism. In such a complex picture, encompassing the period from the 1680s to the 1820s, Hempton roots his work in an admirably clear structure which considers both the global expansion and the transformation of Christianity in this period. It is a book that avoids the twin perils of leading the reader into dense thickets of complicated material and of resorting to over-simplification. Broad themes and social trends are anchored in national contexts and the religious experiences of individual Christians are central to the book, features that are often lost in such wide-ranging studies. The coverage of encounters between missionaries and indigenous peoples, and the role of Christianity in slavery and its abolition, enable Hempton to eschew a Eurocentric viewpoint. Predictably perhaps for a historian of Methodism who works in the USA, the Evangelical movement features strongly, as does religious toleration in the fledgling American and French republics. Hempton's privileging of the ‘Evangelical revival’ perhaps underestimates earlier revivals, especially in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and his claim that the ‘real breakthroughs’ in toleration (p. 125) came in the American and French revolutions underrates the effects of the Toleration Act of 1689 in England. Nevertheless this is an impressive and distinguished contribution to the history of Christianity and one which will become a standard work for students and scholars. For this achievement David Hempton, and the series editor, Gillian R. Evans, are to be congratulated.