In Indigenous Enlightenment, Stuart D. McKee examines how British and American printing technology was used by religious groups to provide printed texts to peoples who had little prior contact with Christianity, in the hopes of spreading Christianity. There was a belief in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries that people learned better with printed books, and that therefore languages should be reduced to writing and subsequently printed to facilitate learning. The printing of manuscripts within the various colonies was deemed important as it was considered that such locally printed books would more accurately reflect the local languages.

McKee's book is centered around case studies from the South Pacific, Madagascar, Bengal, China, and the U.S. Borderlands, examining how printing technology was introduced to these places and identifying some of the challenges that these first printing experiments faced, including the need to create new typefaces, the use of paper in societies that traditionally made no use of the material, the instruction of local people as printers and assistants, and the difficulties in capturing various orthographies. McKee examines printing undertaken by the London Missionary Society (LMS), the Baptist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission. The first chapter focuses on Europeans, examining the backgrounds and ideologies of these evangelical societies and providing much detail about Captain James Cook's journeys that is somewhat tangential to the focus of the chapter's argument. The result is that the chapter jumps from various locations without always demonstrating the link between the sites. Chapters 2 through 5 examine the educational experiences of Indigenous peoples in places such as Hawai'i and Madagascar, with some material included on the work of local people in mission printing presses. These chapters together provide a background on the ways that new educational systems were being introduced to Indigenous people in colonized spaces. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on case studies in Oceania and language collection. In New Zealand, for example, Europeans spent much time learning the Māori language so that they could reduce it to writing and then printing. Yet it was also difficult for Europeans to learn the language from printed books as the Māori language contained sounds that the English alphabet was not able to duplicate accurately. A number of Māori orthographies were compiled, with one by Thomas Kendall in 1827 dropping the letters b, d, f, j, l, s, v, y, and x, following the example set by LMS missionaries in Tahiti. This had ramifications for printing, as standard sets of type contained letters that were not used in Māori printing and thus were extraneous and superfluous weight that needed to be shipped to the colony. In Chapter 7, in the case study on the LMS in Tahiti, McKee makes the important point that the introduction of printing was not always an indicator of the stability of the political system brought by the colonizers and that printing can disrupt assumed political hierarchies.

With his title of Indigenous Enlightenment, McKee is not gesturing to the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that emphasized reason and rationality. Instead, he defines Indigenous Enlightenment as “a multinational credence in messianic devotion and salvation from sin” (427), thus placing the focus on religious conversion. The aim of evangelical enlightenment was to improve the well-being of Indigenous peoples through Christianization and British civilization, and thereby to bring individuals open to British and American colonization into the settler-colonial community. However, the aim of evangelical enlightenment is not the focal point of the book; rather, most attention is given to the technicalities of the printing process.

The strength of the book is the detailed analyses of the technologies of printing in different locations. McKee notes with fine detail how printers often had to create their own typefaces. For example, in chapter 8, “Learning to Print,” McKee provides fascinating detail about how movable type was created in Bengal for Indo-Aryan types. It was a difficult process as the written system for Bengali, for example, varied from one village to another, so that formal writing differed from region to region. Such differences had to be overcome, as did difficulties in printing the Devanagari font as the headstroke needed to be engraved with a consistent weight for it to line up when locked into the press. Such details of the technicalities of how actual typefaces were devised, crafted, engraved, and used are fascinating and well researched. Yet the details of the book at times overshadow the broader argument. The structure of chapters would have been helped by subheadings. Chapters also end abruptly without a summary or conclusion, making it at times unclear what the argument of the chapter is.

Given that the book is focused on Indigenous languages in colonial spaces, there is little attention given to local peoples. Indeed, as McKee himself notes, the voices of Indigenous people are hardly present in the historical record. McKee mostly uses printed sources. However, he does at times use archival sources to enhance the narrative and to provide insight into the difficulties of printing in non-European spaces. McKee's Indigenous Enlightenment provides rich details of how technologies of printing were introduced in colonial spaces in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and places the introduction of, and practices surrounding, these technologies in a broader context of educational change within these spaces. It will be of most interest to historians of printing and media history, and it will provide historians of education and imperialism with some interesting material.