In this insightful study, John Seed confirms the degree to which eighteenth-century apologists for English dissenters created a sense of ‘narrative identity’ for themselves that both matched and answered competing Anglican versions. In writing their own histories, they helped to stabilise and define what were otherwise quite fluid denominational boundaries in their own time as well as justify the further pushing back of their civil disabilities under the Test and Corporation Acts. They repeatedly came back to the great St Bartholomew Day's ejection of 1662 when those ministers who could not accept either episcopacy or the Book of Common Prayer lost their livings. That these men were moderates and had been disgracefully treated was the constant refrain of Edmund Calamy's An abridgement of Mr Baxter's history of his life and times (1702), the first of his innovative attempts to recapture judiciously and accurately the traumas of the ejection and its aftermath using the tried and tested template of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Historians of this ‘embattled minority’ (p. 7) like Calamy were constantly at pains to stress that they were responsible British subjects, indeed more trustworthy guardians of the revolutionary settlement than many Anglicans. This was the steady refrain of Daniel Neal's four-volume History of the Puritans in the 1730s, a text that Seed reasonably regards as ‘The most influential Dissenting history of the eighteenth century’ (p. 41). Neal's insistence on the enmeshing of the Reformation with religious liberties and his nuanced and not uncritical presentation of Oliver Cromwell made him a formidable opponent for spokesmen for the established Church. They were desperately trying to blunt dissenting initiatives for repeal of the Test Act at the time and Ward's volumes made their work harder. By contrast, William Harris's four volumes on seventeenth-century history, published in the 1750s, were less emollient. This Devon minister (an old Whig, educated at Taunton Academy) was not inclined to tread cautiously and he was as ready to defend Hugh Peter as he was Oliver Cromwell. It is one of the central claims of Seed's book that one should read Harris as embodying a mid-century militancy that was losing patience with the Church of England's tardiness to offer further concessions to dissenters during and after the archiepiscopate of Thomas Secker (1758–68). Several influential Anglicans deplored this growth of discordance, and Seed usefully positions Harris on the fringes of the Hollis/Blackburn/Lindsey network. The last two chapters – dealing with dissenting histories of the 1770s and 1780s, and Burke's determined exclusion of dissenters from the embattled British state in his later years – confirm the trend to increased polarisation and polemical astringency as one side took its stand on the limitations of the 1689 settlement while the other re-emphasised its completeness. The book is a fine achievement: the several chapters are concise and well-ordered with the exception of the third on Hume's History of England that appears to have strayed in from another book. Dissenting histories highlights the frequently astute and crafted historical positioning of themselves by Protestant dissenters even if John Seed appears too ready to accept at face value these minority presentations that were never quite able to displace the accepted Anglican narratives offered by Clarendon, Sacheverell, Sherlock and scores of their clerical imitators.