This is a welcome addition to a rich and growing body of scholarship dissecting and grappling with the historical relationship between religion and empire, especially for the British imperial context. In it Carey ‘traces the religious arguments about [British] convict transportation from its origins in 1788 until its end in Gibraltar in 1875’ (p. 21), with a particular emphasis on the influence of elite thinking on both the system's ‘reformative possibilities’ and later its ‘abolition’ (p. 21). While the focus is necessarily on the various Australian colonies involved (especially New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land), transportation to Gibraltar and Bermuda is also considered. A focus on the religious arguments for and against transportation, she argues, shines the spotlight on the ‘convict system's lesser known but significant features’, namely that punishment was not the ‘exclusive focus of penal discipline’. Rather it was ‘moderated by the functional demands of deploying convict labour’ and ‘the rhetoric – and sometimes the reality – of social and religious reform’ as the nineteenth century unfolded (p. 306). This is a careful study of the ideas that both sustained and eventually militated against transportation as a penal system, of the religious groups that propagated those ideas (and sought ways to activate them) and the individuals who were instrumental to both thinking and practice. As such it is not a full-blown history of transportation, but rather serves as a valuable exemplar of the kind of complex study of religion called for by recent practitioners of the new imperial history. It is also a clear window into the complex relationship between politics and religion in early to mid nineteenth-century Britain. In these respects, Carey pays close attention to the changing religious contexts of the period, to the different operative groups, to changing political circumstances (especially the transition from Tory to Whig governments) and to changing penal thought and practice. The focus is broadly chronological. Following a helpful introduction to transportation's history and historiography, initial chapters consider the largely supportive positions of Evangelical Anglicans, Quakers (who were instrumental in reforming penal practices but favoured the ‘amelioration’ rather than the outright ‘abolition’ of transportation, p. 77) and some Catholics, contrasted with those Catholics (like the Revd William Ullathorne, Vicar General of New South Wales) and Christian utilitarians like the Anglican archbishop Richard Whately who lent their voices to the anti-transportation debate. Religious ideas and motivations were central to each party's stance. Further chapters on innovative penal experiments on Norfolk Island (1837–55) and the use of the probation system in Van Diemen's Land (1839–57), along with a later explicitly ‘reformatory’ emphasis in Western Australia (1850–68), bear out the ways in which religious motivation, ideas and practices were deployed in the belief that the system might reform or rehabilitate those imprisoned. The final four chapters, using different geographic contexts, trace the demise of transportation, again emphasising how religious rhetoric was deployed to argue against the system both in Britain and Australia. Carey's line of narrative here neatly reinforces the historical reality that various streams of thought and practice co-existed throughout the period, and that a straight historical line from one position to another cannot be neatly drawn. Her work is in no ways hagiographical or uncritical. While she provides a much-needed corrective in elaborating the role and influence of religion, Carey also provides us with a disturbing commentary on the ways in which religious ideas, while understandable within their particular context, can just as gainfully be employed to support human depredations as to argue against them. Thus stated, the terrible irony is that religious ideas continued to support other forms of imperial transportation (especially that of poor or working-class children from Britain to other parts of the Empire) well beyond the end of convict transportation. In all of these respects Carey's book provides profound and sobering food for thought.