The Cathedral of All Saints', Allahabad (1870–87) is an arresting exercise in what was known as ‘Tropical Pointed’: unmistakably English in being modelled on the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, it also has massive walls to keep out the heat of Uttar Pradesh and sports gargoyles in the shape of tigers. Its compromise between English form and local conditions epitomises the concerns of Alex Bremner's monumental book, which transforms our understanding of Victorian ecclesiology and its contribution to the material culture of the British Empire. It shows that efforts to create a global Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century rested not only on the expansion of the British Empire, on the imperial theology analysed by Rowan Strong and on the institution-building charted by Hilary Carey, but also on architecture. The aesthetic principles developed by journals such as The Ecclesiologist equipped a globe-trotting Anglican clergy with a prescriptive but flexible vision of how to rebuild their spiritual authority. Bremner shows how responsibility for church building in the early nineteenth-century colonies passed from laymen happy to build cheap imitations of James Gibbs to a group of tough, predominantly High Church bishops among whom William Broughton, George Augustus Selwyn, John Medley and Robert Gray were particularly prominent. These ‘priestly architects' not only took the initiative in church design, often acting as their own architects, but turned from ‘Government Grecian’ to the Gothic. Their stance reflected the constitutional crisis of 1828–32, the early Tractarian insistence that the Church of England was a primitive and apostolic rather than a state Church and the challenges posed by dissent and Roman Catholicism at home and – more acutely – abroad. For churchmen keen to stiffen the defence of episcopacy and to insist upon dignified worship in their new dioceses, the researches of the Cambridge Camden Society offered a powerful set of ‘models’ for churches and cathedrals. Ancient village churches such as St Mary's, Iffley, or St Michael's Longstanton, recommended themselves because they were tough as well as pure, much as missionary clergy themselves sought to be, while pointed Gothic cathedrals could be simple yet grand, rallying disoriented colonials around their spires. Imperial Gothic projected then an increasingly aggressive and masculine image of Anglicanism, even if at least one woman – Gray's talented wife Sophy – had a hand in shaping it.

Yet ‘Imperial Gothic’ was never the crude projection of a static style onto foreign lands. Not only was ‘correctness’ as understood by ecclesiologists always changing, but it was rendered flexible by the Church's push into very different kinds of terrain. Bremner shows how the challenge of extreme climates shifted the ecclesiological initiative to clergymen on the spot. From London, The Ecclesiologist hosted without bossing a long debate on ‘Tropical Pointed’: should churches in hot climates be ‘speluncar’ like the Spanish churches of the Canary Islands, whose massive walls and recessed windows sheltered worshippers from the sun, or lighter efforts whose slats and open narthexes exposed them to soothing breezes? As a result, and in line with other early Victorian disciplines, ecclesiology lost its schematic overtones and became developmental and organic; its models regarded as seeds whose growth depended on where they were planted. There was thus nothing ‘incorrect’ in building in wood, baked mud or even elephant grass or preaching from tents and ‘iron pots’ where stone was unavailable. Imperial Gothic was to be ‘emphatically English’ but that meant it must be Ruskinian in its ability to incorporate foreign motifs. Perhaps the most beautiful and ironic examples that Bremner cites to support his thesis is St Barnabas's church on Norfolk Island (1875–80), built as a memorial to John Patteson, the martyred bishop of Melanesia. Boasting Morris and Co. stained glass and a font of Torquay and Devonshire marble, it was an ‘aggressive’ demonstration of missionary purpose. Yet it also incorporated Melanesian inlaid shell-work, gesturing towards Patteson's sensitive understanding of mission even as it memorialised his disastrous failure to communicate it to the islanders in time.

Bremner's colonials were admittedly often behind the metropole in their tastes. Bodley's polychromatic or ‘holy zebra’ churches were too exotic in this period for Australia, while both there and in Canada it could be hard to persuade cash-strapped and Low Church communities to give up pews and pew rents. Yet colonial experiments clearly shaped the look of Anglicanism even in the British Isles, through ‘feedback loops’. Thus the severe plainness of St Augustine's College, Canterbury (1845–8) thrust imperial Gothic into the cradle of English Christianity. St Augustine's was built to train missionaries, but a colonial openness to new materials and styles carried into the building of urban mission churches. Indeed prefabricated iron churches turned out to be more suitable for east London than Australia, where fiery suns had turned ‘tin tabernacles’ into ‘iron pots’. Finally, Bremner suggests that imperial Gothic proved popular in Ireland, where it suited a Church that first dreaded and then had to survive disestablishment by thrusting its roots deeper into native culture. By concentrating on architecture, Bremner thus provides a theoretical model of missionary Anglicanism that transcends an emphasis on either metropolitan domination or its correlate, native resistance. From his ‘planetary’ perspective (p. 435), the interest of Anglican builders in ‘appropriateness’ produced startling yet controlled variations – from the ‘Tropical Pointed’ of Allahabad to the ‘Hyperborean Gothic’ of Newfoundland – on a common theme: the church as ‘autonomous cultural agency’ (p. 366). Imperial Gothic was the aesthetic complement to the emergence of national synods and national Churches within the empire, a development with which the book closes.

Bremner's book is, then, an unrivalled portrait of the imperial ambitions and Gothic aesthetics of high Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century, its global scope and theoretical ambition matched by its fastidious analysis of individual churches and by 362 well-chosen illustrations. While Bremner has shown that the British Empire looked Anglican because Anglican High Churchmen developed an edifice complex, his book is rather reserved about the costs and benefits of their missionary strategy. If the challenge of mastering religious diversity in the colonies turned even churchmen suspicious of Tractarianism into passionate ecclesiologists, then was theirs a successful response to the challenge? Bremner certainly mentions the doubts of Low Churchmen and Evangelicals on this point, but tends to present them as irritating obstacles to his visionary protagonists. But while churches like Allahabad were certainly aesthetic triumphs, how far were they ever filled? Might Anglican resources have been more rationally deployed in training native missionaries or in circulating literature than in an architectural arms-race with Catholics and Nonconformists? In defining its field, this book provokes new questions as well as providing a wealth of answers.