Thanks in no small measure to the distinguished work elsewhere of several of the contributors to this volume, the need to consider the history of Christianity as a global phenomenon has become something of an historiographical given. However, the editors’ choice of the term ‘Global Christianity’ over and against the label ‘World Christianity’ with its emphasis on indigenous (non-western) translations/appropriations of Christianity—famously favoured by Lamin Sanneh—together with the volume’s chosen periodisation, draws attention to the fact that for all its impressive global coverage, it remains essentially a Eurocentric account of its topic.Footnote ¹

Revealingly, in his introduction, Hartmut Lehmann lists ‘Eurocentric positions’ as a particularly tough challenge when writing the history of Christianity in this period; one which he believes we lack enough empirical evidence to overcome. However, one of the two historians he cites as having done so much to articulate this problem, Philip Jenkins, memorably wrote: ‘On balance, I would argue that at the time of Magna Carta [1215] […] if we imagine the typical Christian, we should still be thinking not of a French artisan, but of a Syrian peasant or Mesopotamian town-dweller, an Asian not a European’.Footnote ² This points to a significant fact that is unsurprisingly overlooked by the decision to begin the first volume of their global account of its topic in 1500. This identification of Christianity with Christendom during the Middle Ages is seriously misleading, since it ignores non-European Christians, (chiefly Copts and followers of the Syriac Rite), and non-Christian Europeans (mainly Muslims and Jews), as well as the long, gradual process of Christian conversion which only officially ‘ended’ with that of the hitherto pagan rulers of Lithuania in 1387. It also ignores the fact that Christianity (and Catholicism) has thus been the majority faith in Europe for probably no more than half of the first two millenia of Christian history (roughly from 1000 CE to the present).Footnote ³ This complicates the ‘myth’ still pedalled by those who argue for Western Europe’s special status by virtue of the fact that Christianity had primarily European roots and one which Lehmann does little to scotch by such remarks as: ‘The vast majority of all Christians then lived in Europe […] [Also] the top theologians lived in Europe’ (p. 3).Footnote ⁴ Moreover, since at least the mid-twentieth century, the heartlands of Catholicism have not been in Europe but in Latin America, where in 2010 there lived 470 million baptised Catholics (41% of the total and more than Europe and North America combined). Although all the signs are that Africa, which currently hosts over 200 million Catholics, up from a mere sixteen million in 1955, will be picking up the baton by 2050 as the continent with the most baptised Catholics when it is calculated that Europe will account for just 15% of the world’s total of that Christian denomination.Footnote ⁵

The rationale behind this volume’s chosen periodisation becomes clear when we read the title of section nine to Lehmann’s introduction: ‘The Victorious March of Absolutism in Europe’ (p. 7) which contains the astonishing assertion: ‘The victorious march of the absolutist form of government in early modern Europe is a factor than can hardly be overestimated in accounts of global Christianity’ (p. 7). Leaving to one side the by now extensive revisionist historiography which since at least the early 1980s has forced us to rethink what we understand by ‘absolutism’ and seriously qualify such narratives as the ‘rise of the nation state’ in early modern Europe, it is simply not enough to say that because the overseas churches of the Iberian empires were so economically dependent on the princes, global Christianity was thus largely determined by the decisions of Lisbon and Madrid. Indeed, Lehmann himself makes reference to the ‘polycentric structure of global Christianity from the mid-16^th century to the end of the 18^th century’ (p. 13). Although he then goes on to refer to ‘the overwhelming influence of state power’ in the eighteenth century. This is a seriously problematic assertion for which the empirical evidence is simply absent. Unfortunately, Mariano Delgado, in what is otherwise a deeply erudite and astonishingly broad-ranging account of Catholicism in Spain, Portugal, and their Empires, follows this up on the opening page of his chapter, immediately following Lehmann’s introduction, with the quotation: ‘Never had any faith [Christianity] had so great an effect upon so large a proportion of mankind’ (p. 17). Why Professor Delgado regards this (misleadingly inaccurate) assertion made almost eighty years ago by Kenneth Scott Latourette in volume three of his A History of the Expansion of Christianity (1939) as authoritative enough to merit endorsement in 2017 confirms the feeling that the ultimate project of this volume is to refurbish and update what is, in essence, a Eurocentric account of the spread outwards of Christianity from its Eurocentric heartlands, whose broadcasted messages inevitably got more scrambled the further they were away from their Old World transmitters (until the latter got stronger with the growing military might of the West in the eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth century). Such a model, which effectively casts the indigenous peoples of the New World and South and East Asia, into passive radio receivers, does not allow much space to take account of how the Christian message was actively appropriated by non-Europeans.

This is of course not to say that there are not very good things in this volume. Particularly worthy of singling out are Bruce Master’s authoritative account of Christians under Ottoman rule; Kevin Ward’s nuanced and richly informed survey of Christianity in Africa; Ronnie Po-chia Hsia’s genuinely panoramic and polished conspectus of Christianity in Asia and Jan Stievermann’s intelligent and crisply articulated account of the Churches and christian communities in North America. All of whom make the crucial point that Christian missionaries and priests found themselves too few and their prospective converts too many.

However, the chapters on Europe have a tendency to schematic logic and terminological abstraction which, at times, clearly defeated the translator and made me wonder whether even those trained in theology would be able to follow and make sense of the argument. This brings me to a question that was at the back of my mind throughout as I read the volume: for whom is it intended? Although it does not assume much prior historical knowledge on the part of the reader, it certainly makes few concessions to the theologically incurious. Moreover, its overall style of ‘tell not show’ makes it a dry read. Often I felt I was consulting an encyclopaedia rather than reading a survey volume. However, unlike the latest academic encyclopedias, it does not provide the reader with enough bibliographical guidance to take things further. The scant footnotes too often merely refer to other survey volumes, many of which are in German, thus reflecting the origins of the project out of which these volumes emerged.

The level of production of the volume is generally high with Brill’s customarily clear typography, broad margins, and secure binding, though at the price this is the least one can ask. But the fact that much of the text has been translated out of German has perhaps contributed to the relatively high number of typos. There are also some surprising factual errors that have escaped the editors’ attention as the result of what, I imagine, is an unavoidably convoluted editorial process. Perhaps the most egregious is that which makes St Anthony of Padua (1195–1231) a Capuchin almost three centuries before that Order’s foundation (p. 138). Although the description of the revised Roman Breviary of 1568—which was imposed mostly on secular clergy who did not already have access to a liturgy which could claim at least two centuries’ adoption—as ‘a compulsory prayer book’ (p. 186) does not exactly inspire confidence in the reader. The author—a highly distinguished scholar of Lutheran Protestantism—clearly does not understand the content of this Roman Catholic office book and the crucial role it played as ‘pocket seminary’ for secular clergy post the Council of Trent. Closing this volume I found myself crying out for more engagement with the reciprocal dynamic between the Old World and the New which characterised the making of Christianity—in all its variants—as a world religion.