This book will serve as a valuable survey of racial ideas (though it is not intended as a systematic treatment of this history), of the early history of an organised anthropology and ethnology, and as a fine introduction to the debates over geology, chronology and language that captured the attention of thinkers beginning in the seventeenth century. At its core, however, is the relationship between religious thought and imperatives, and developments in the natural and biological sciences. David Livingstone has written a fascinating and valuable account of the ways in which the desire to retain the biblical story of humanity's origins, found in Genesis, acted as a spur and bulwark vis-à-vis alternative theories of these origins. Was Adam the first human, or were there others before him (pre-Adamites)? This is a complex story, oftentimes at variance with what many might still imagine to have been the unremitting antagonism between religion and science in the modern era. This is, however, a story not only of theology's impact on science but also the impact particular trends in scientific research and thinking had on biblical exegesis. Livingstone's book is also, therefore, a valuable contribution to the history of modern religious thought in its own right, to the history of biblical criticism and interpretation. Religion and race, as Livingstone demonstrates throughout, were intimately tied. Their interconnected history is profoundly complex, and often confounds popular or common assumptions and images. Certainly one of the most important themes running through Livingstone's work is the progressive impulse – at least from our perspective – at work in religion. Thus, debates over human origins, human differences, racial identities and slavery were also debates over Scripture, over the truth or accuracy of biblical anthropology. Complex, because on the one hand much of what we understand as intellectual progress, at the birth of modernity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hinged on undoing biblical literalism and on the emergence of scepticism with regard to religious accounts of the world and mankind; on the other hand, it was also this literal reading of the Genesis account of creation that reined in the worst sorts of arguments about blacks, Indians and other non-Europeans. The pre-Adamite argument, together with the polygenist argument, seemed to depend on a non-traditional reading of Scripture, or on the insistence that Genesis was an incomplete or incorrect rendering of human creation and development. A powerful intellectual and cultural conservatism could thus produce an extraordinary progressive politics and moral economy. As Livingstone remarks, the ironies ‘are manifold’ (p. 76). This engaging and important book reminds us repeatedly of the complicated, often ironic relationship between religion and science.