John Roxborogh comes to his book with strong self-awareness. He is a New Zealander with long experience as an expatriate in Malaysia, conscious that he is an outsider to a history that is not his own. But that is true of many historians and it can be as much an asset as a liability, given self-awareness. Roxborogh acknowledges that Malaysians themselves should have the last word; they should shape these historical conversations. He hopes that his book ‘will assist those conversations' (p. xii). There is every chance of that, because this is an excellent account of a complex history.

The most obvious fact about the religious condition of Malaysia is that Islam is the dominant religion within important regional and urban/rural variations. ‘Today Christians in Malaysia navigate the politicisation of religion and ethnicity, and express their loyalty as citizens, yet also feel a sense of marginalisation’ (p. xv). This acute issue illustrates the kind of tension that weaves it way throughout the whole book, illustrating the challenges that Christians faced, and continue to face, as a religious minority.

This is a tricky history to write, since Malaysia as we now know it came into being only in 1963 (and after 1965 when Singapore was ejected). The great strength of the book is that it surveys all the proto-territories that now comprise Malaysia – there is very little other scholarship that provides this sort of overview and perspective – and it offers a wealth of footnotes to other scholarly and archival sources. Roxborogh demonstrates that Christianity was well established and indigenous by the time that Malaysia came into being; it is not just foreign and recent. The story also has rich lessons for historians of Christianity in other non-Western contexts. It offers a framework for thinking about global Christianity.

Roxborogh structures his work in five chapters with chronological boundaries that seek to recognise events where the agency was local, not just external (and colonial). The first chapter focuses on the effects of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rule in the various territories that now make up Malaysia, illustrating its ‘long history of contextualisation and inculturation’ (p. 8). The second chapter takes the story up to 1941. The main issues here are the growing proportion of Chinese among the population, the varying nationalities and denominations among the Christians, and ‘the need to navigate multiple identities' (p. 35). Chapter iii assesses the effects of the Japanese invasion and occupation during World War Two, the state of emergency imposed in 1948 and the lead-up to unification in 1963. Once again multiple identities raised difficult questions over the future of Malaya. Chapter iv considers the new state of Malaysia through to the end of the Cold War. In 1971 Islam was made the official religion of the new country; for the Churches, responding to a Muslim government rather than a colonial one proved no easy matter. At the same time the Charismatic Renewal and ecumenical endeavours demonstrated real gains. The final chapter brings the narrative up to 2013. Tensions certainly remained, but efforts at unity and reconciliation continued to take place and the outcomes and trajectories of Christianity in Malaysia would have surprised Malaysian Christians just half a century earlier.

This is a big story that is well told. In a relatively short book the coverage is on occasion necessarily cursory but Roxborogh provides numerous interesting details without getting bogged down in those details. It is never narrowly focused on just one or two denominations; it is balanced and ecumenical in its coverage. If there is a central theme it is one of navigating complex and multiple religious and ethnic identities. For that reason in particular the inclusion of maps would have brought some helpful clarity for readers less familiar with the history and geography of Malaysia. Even so, this is an important part of the history of global Christianity, and this is a book to be welcomed.