This impressive and important study of colonial Christianity makes a key contribution to the emergent literature on the relationship between empire and missions. Hilary Carey has filled an important gap in this literature, which has heretofore been dominated by accounts of missions to indigenous peoples. By examining white settler colonies as a mission field in its own right during the second British empire, Carey convincingly shows how colonial missions provided the religious underpinnings of the “British World.” The book’s careful attention to the ideological, demographic, and cultural dynamics of this process and its wide scope of denominational and geographic comparison make this story a particularly compelling contribution to the social history of empire. Extensive statistical information and close contextual attention bolsters the other narrative, biographical, and institutional evidence and collectively provides a rich source base for Carey’s analysis of the global movement of Christian peoples, ideas, and beliefs during the nineteenth century.

This analysis rests on four broad components that scaffold the book. The first section outlines the ideological and contextual basis of colonial missions, exploring how the changing basis of nation and empire provided fertile soil for religious expansion and consolidation in the nineteenth century, due in large part to the disestablishment of church and state in the second empire that enabled a more informal association of churches in the British diaspora. The second section offers a detailed account of the denominational bodies that undertook colonial missions, including the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the Sacred Congregation and the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, the Colonial and Continental Church Society, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (and other minor and independent Methodist societies), the Colonial Missionary Society, the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, and the Glasgow Colonial Society, in addition to auxiliary organizing branches of the churches themselves. Although widely varied in their experience, these bodies all to some degree manifested tensions between established and voluntary church personae, perpetual battles for funding and credibility, and attempts to harness colonial missions to empire—or at least define them in a relational way—that were as strategic as they were sincere. The third section investigates the training of colonial clergy by Anglican and Catholic mission colleges in Britain and Ireland, and the fourth section considers Christian colonization schemes—both as an idea generated by colonial reformers and religious philanthropists and disputed by humanitarians and in practice as carried out in Sierra Leone and in Otago and Canterbury, New Zealand.

Together, these facets bespeak how “the churches were essential to the creation of a Christian consensus which supported the expansion of the British world through the planting of religious institutions in every conceivable corner of the empire” (xiv). Yet Carey also shows the shifting and fragmented nature of this colonial Christian consensus, which was composed of as diverse a field of actors and ideas as that which characterized British religion and society. Such diversity meant that the exportation of settler Christianity often foundered on the variability of funding, rivalries, labor, training, organization, and social conditions, including the push-and-pull factors of family and employment that characterized other trends of emigration. In particular, the fortunes of colonial missions often seemed to languish in the shadow of the increasing attention devoted to foreign missions, and Carey rightly shows the relational nature of these enterprises rather than treating colonial missions in isolation from their counterparts to the “heathen.” Carey also accordingly wrestles with the nature and extent of the impact of colonial missions since her narrative often rests on misguided hopes and stymied plans, such as the SPG’s failure to revive the colonial aspect of its mission work on which it was founded. Yet this measured approach allows for a more nuanced picture of the participants in and contributors to “God’s Empire,” a social landscape that Carey paints with a deft hand. What emerges is often a surprising picture of how the more “successful” enterprises were carried out by unexpected servants of imperial Britain, such as Irish Catholics. That Edward Gibbon Wakefield—who was not an explicit proponent of colonial missions but whose writings nonetheless had a formative impact on Christian colonization—could lay claim to the fruits of these schemes proves that these initiatives made a subtle discursive and cultural impact as well as a more explicit institutional and demographic one.

Carey, in undertaking this ambitious project to integrate the radically different premises within and among Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Dissenting churches and their varied growth in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, should be commended for creating a cohesive account of the religious expansion of “Greater Britain.” Part of what makes it possible for Carey to treat this uneven development in such a cohesive way is a heavy emphasis on the metropolitan origins and frameworks of colonial missions. While the preface emphasizes that the colonial churches were as much a product of the periphery as of the metropole, and that they departed from as much as reproduced British schisms and identities, the study does not fully develop the angle of self-governance. Although Carey acknowledges that this development would only come to fruition in the twentieth century, perhaps more explicit attention to the relationship among the growth of constitutional, cultural, and religious self-governance would help clarify the truly “colonial” dimensions of these missions. The implication that the churches constituted an outward flow from metropole to colony prevents a closer engagement with the “new imperial history,” which is something of a missed opportunity since Carey’s evidence clearly indicates that the religious metropole was a product of developments in the British world. The analysis also veers toward an overly institutional story, but this emphasis is entirely in keeping with the historical business of mission work, which relied so heavily on public relations, fund-raising, administration, and organization for its successes and failures—a contingency that colonial missions shared with foreign missions. Moreover, the institutional dynamics of Carey’s study are enlivened by the colorful personalities and leadership, social textures, and turf battles that weave the story into such a rich fabric. In the final analysis, even if religious institution-building did not supply the same cause for expansion in the second empire that it did in the first, it certainly proved one of the key effects.