This work is an impressive study of the ways in which divergent political histories and ecclesiologies early in the history of the Anglican Communion have had a continuing influence on its life. Seabury and Inglis were both priests serving the Church of England in the northern American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. Both were High Churchmen, deeply committed to the establishment of an Anglican episcopate in North America and rooted in a patristic ‘primitive’ sacramental piety. After the War of American Independence, Seabury became the first bishop in the Episcopal Church in the United States and Inglis the first bishop of the Church of England in the remaining American colonies, later the Anglican Church of Canada. If the formative ecclesiology of each bishop was the same, the radically different political cultures in which they came to serve profoundly affected the way in which the bishops were able to approach matters of clerical discipline, liturgy, doctrine and polity. These differences remained critical in the subsequent history of the Anglican Communion, from the early Lambeth Conferences even to our own day. In colonies characterised politically by a determined loyalty to the British crown, Inglis could build on a liturgical foundation of confident adherence to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. From an ecclesiological perspective, the Canadian Church consistently reiterated its commitment (articulated in 1893) ‘to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments and Discipline of Christ’ as received and transmitted by the Church of England ‘and to transmit the same unimpaired to our posterity’. Seabury, on the other hand, a committed loyalist during the war, found himself bishop in a country determined to articulate its entire political independence of Britain. Most Episcopal churchmen, while claiming loyalty to their inheritance from the Church of England, consciously modelled their polity on the contractual Enlightenment principles of the American constitution. The Prayer Book proposed in 1786, while stating that ‘the doctrines of the Church of England are preserved entire’, deleted the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and omitted the descent into hell from the Apostles Creed, along with ‘hurtful’ parts of the Psalter, the sign of the cross in baptism, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis. Seabury fought a rearguard action to restore the most essential of these (aided by the insistence of the Church of England on certain restitutions before episcopacy might be conferred), but even so the evening canticles did not return to the American Prayer Book until 1893. The polity of the Episcopal Church assumed that authority within the Church emerged from below, but Seabury and Inglis both held that the episcopate was the source of authority and government in the Church under God. Hebb navigates these historiographically and politically contested waters with both skill and judgement. His history clarifies the origins of an Episcopal Church that sees itself as part of but not answerable to the Anglican Communion.