Christina Petterson has become one of the most prolific researchers on the 18th-century Moravian Church’s settlements and missions. Her work is laudable for its extensive archival research. Unlike many scholars who focus on Moravian theology, piety, and cross-cultural exchanges, Petterson interprets the church’s social and religious structures through the lens of Marxist economic theory. This approach offers new and helpful insights about how the Moravians managed their transatlantic religious network within the context and confines of early modern political and economic structure. In this book, Petterson analyzes three quite different Moravian mission locales: Pennsylvania, St. Thomas, and Greenland. Each of these at one time had some type of communal economy, which Moravians often called a “common household,” that supported the church’s mission work. Bethlehem was different from the other mission stations because it was not only the headquarters for the mission to Native Americans, but it was also the residence of hundreds of European Moravians and an exemplar of Moravian religious culture.

Petterson charts how and why the church’s leadership in Germany moved away from a common household economy as the church dealt with issues of debt and the growth of capitalism. Her discussion of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, relies heavily on the earlier work of Katherine Carté who demonstrated how the communal economy of Bethlehem was integrated with the mission to Native Americans. Petterson adds helpful nuance to previous studies by drawing on archival material in Germany to show that the leaders were concerned that Bethlehem was not producing useful capital. The discussion of the St Thomas mission relies on Jan Hüsgen’s investigation of Moravian reliance on enslaved labor on the church’s plantations in the West Indies, but Petterson adds helpful information on the economic concerns of the church. She shows a clear contrast between the economic and social organization of the mission in the West Indies and that of Greenland, where the missionaries tried to incorporate converts into a Herrnhut-style system. Petterson makes a strong argument that after the death of Zinzendorf, the church’s leadership in Germany, especially Johann Friedrich Koeber, increasingly separated the “outer” sphere of for-profit businesses from the “inner” sphere of spirituality and piety.

There is much in this book that will be of interest to scholars of early modern missions, Moravianism, and colonial economics, but the book does not deliver what is promised in the title. The focus on three Moravian mission locales over a period of about sixty years is too small to claim that this is a study of capitalism in early modern missions. The more modest subtitle is more descriptive of the book. The book uncovers much helpful material from various Moravian archives and does engage critically with classic German economic theorists like Weber and Marx, but does not address the question of whether the Moravian approach to missions and economics was unique or illustrative of larger trends in Christian mission. How did the Moravian economic system compare to that of Halle, for instance, or even various Catholic missions. It is surprising that the author has so little to say about colonialism and capitalism, except in the context of Greenland, and does not investigate the differences between the Danish West Indies and the British West Indies. The Moravian work in Jamaica, for instance, began with the gift of a planation and its slaves to the church. Petterson raises some intriguing ideas about the Moravians perpetuating feudalism within the church, but one could argue that colonialism was feudalism globalized. It is surprising that Petterson did not delve into the role of trade and shipping in the Moravian Church, particularly the importance of New York City and London in the Moravian network. It would be worth considering the case of Henry Van Vleck, for instance, who was a prosperous Moravian merchant whom longed to retire to Bethlehem. It would also have been useful to contrast the economy of Bethlehem with Wachovia in North Carolina, which was one of the most expensive investments the Moravians made in North America. Wachovia would be led by Friedrich von Marshall who Petterson identifies as one of the advocates for a more profit-focused approach in missions. But other scholars may take up these lines of inquirty now that Petterson has opened up interesting new avenues for research on the economics of transatlantic Protestant missions.