In a published London Missionary Society (LMS) sermon from 1807, new converts are described as “like a tender plant which makes an uncompromising appearance, and is in danger of being nipped by every chilling frost” (104); likewise, in a 1796 sermon, non-Christian areas of the world are compared to “a parched desert where no water is, where the thirsty traveler pants and dies” (173). The language of nature and science clearly influenced these sermons and the rhetoric they reproduced. Sujit Sivasundaram's monograph collects and contextualizes this use of nature and science by missionaries to look closely at the relationship between theology, nature, and science in early nineteenth-century LMS missions to the Pacific. The book makes two conclusions: the “religious self ” of missionaries (and to an extent converts) was shaped because of their exposure to science, and science was used to support LMS rhetoric in Britain (10). The first assertion, the most novel aspect of the book, is not fully realized; the second is convincingly presented.

The book has two broad sections. Part 1 looks at how missionaries of the LMS used a “theology of nature” to do their work in the Pacific (43). The focus of this section is the way science informed the missionary's “religious self ” as revealed in his approaches to education, conversion, and death (10). Part 2 discusses how science was used in LMS periodicals and in the LMS Museum in London to promote the work of the society to the British public. In using this format, Sivasundaram hopes to take the reader through a “transition from studying how evangelicals defined themselves to a discussion of how evangelicals portrayed themselves to others and others to themselves” (147). An introduction and a conclusion bookend the six chapters that make up the body of the book.

The monograph fits best with the work pioneered by Brian Stanley and others on the relationship between missions, science, and the Enlightenment. Sivasundaram opens up this field of inquiry by pushing beyond Stanley's original argument that missionaries used the ideas of the Enlightenment, by arguing that science shaped their identity. Discussion of how science supported mission rhetoric, although not a new argument in the scholarship, is particularly well presented in chapters 6 and 7. Other scholarships also get attention. The author hopes to convince historians of science that missionary science formed a “popular and religious view of nature” that was “in tension with more elite knowledges” in Britain and the empire (8); this is an intriguing argument, but one not really dealt with in the body of the work. Sivasundaram also argues that British understandings of science and nature were constructed in response to contact with foreign environments like the Pacific. Following the trend of seeing the inside of Britain in the context of the empire, this argument makes sense; however, Sivasundaram never takes us into the lives of Britons or into British science to make apparent the links between the Pacific, the LMS, and British science. The introduction sets out an ambitious set of goals, only some of which the body of the book attains. The monograph might have been better served by presenting a narrower historiographical framework.

Grasping the identity of missionaries is more difficult than many historians allow. Missionaries often presented different images of themselves depending on the text they were writing and the intended audience they were writing to. A letter or journal entry written with an eye to publication could present a different set of identities and use different language than a letter written between missionaries in the field. Sivasundaram is not always cognizant of these textual problems. His intriguing suggestion that science and nature informed the missionary's identity relies heavily on published texts, like the published sermons above, to make its case. Mission societies, especially by the end of the period covered here, were pushing hard to market themselves to the British public. It is often in this context that missionaries, in writing articles and sermons for publication, invoked the language of nature and science to explain themselves to the British public. Sivasundaram, for example, discusses an article in the LMS periodical comparing the sloth and the beaver to the fallen man and the honest convert. This article uses metaphor to communicate with its readers in Britain; however, to argue that this metaphor proves that “organicism was central to evangelical attitudes to teaching” and in turn “central to the life of faith” is an assertion needing more substantive archival support than Sivasundaram provides (93). Further reading of missionary journals and unpublished letters would be a useful way for Sivasundaram to get at these difficult and interesting questions of identity. Published texts open the door to the missionary voice, but it is in reading the unpublished missionary that we really get close to their world.

The focus on published texts proves advantageous in the latter half of the monograph. Sustained readings of published texts show how the language of science and nature was invoked to support the work of the LMS in the Pacific. Mission stations are represented as institutions making order out of the chaos of the Pacific environment and producing a natural bounty able to support a healthy community of industrious converts. For Sivasundaram, these representations of a Pacific region remade by mission stations provided a “common ground of knowledge” around which missionaries, their converts, and their supporters in Britain could celebrate the Christianization of the Pacific (11).

Some important aspects are missing from this study. Given the book's focus on nature and science, the absence of sustained discussion of gender, sexuality, and reproduction is particularly glaring. Also, while indigenous perspectives are not a focus of the monograph, Sivasundaram's partial discussions of Pacific Islanders' responses are distracting: discussion of indigenous response should have been either fully realized or relegated to the sidelines. This book is most successful when it focuses on how science and nature was used as a shared language between missionaries and their supporters in Britain. How this language exposes the missionary's own identity is still open to interpretation.