This complex, subtle and learned book is devoted to the concept of race, its emergence and intellectual persistence, in the early modern and modern worlds. Its argument is that ‘interpretations of the Bible and certain branches of the discipline of theology have played an influential role in shaping racial attitudes over the past four centuries’ (p. 1). It sets out to show ‘how scripture has been mobilised in the pursuit of certain theories of race, ethnic identities, racial prejudices and anti-racist sentiments’. It is not concerned either with race as a political or institutional issue of power, or with religion as a social movement. In important respects it represents a personal odyssey, charting the routes by which the author abandoned his early hypothesis: that the categories of race ultimately attained such horrific prominence in the first half of the twentieth century as a consequence of the intellectual vacuum left by the decline of scriptural authority in the Atlantic world. In reality, Kidd finally concludes, there was no simple process of substitution; for example he eschews the term ‘secularisation’ and offers no reformulation of that particular master narrative. He argues instead that the Bible itself is essentially colour-blind, offering much comment on custom, lineage and ethnicity but silence on race. Its contribution to discussions on race rested on the lasting combination of literal readings or interpretation of the text; a general belief in the Old Testament offering of both a sacred history and anthropology of the world; and reliance on the universal message of the New linked to grace, atonement and redemption. Together these injected racial relevance, great seriousness and continued vitality into questions prompted by scriptural texts. For instance, were Jesus and Adam black or white? Where were the remnants of the lost tribes of Israel to be found? What was the relative importance of Aryan and Semitic elements in the understanding of religion? The inheritance of conflicting answers spawned by these scholarly and not-so-scholarly arguments since the mid-eighteenth century have fed the fundamental division between those favouring polygenetic and monogenetic explanations of mankind's development. It has also provided an immensely fertile reservoir of ideas to be trawled in support of forms both of superiority, separation or subordination, and anti-racist or egalitarian beliefs. Central though monogenisis was to both Scripture and eighteenth-century science, the universalism of the Enlightenment and its search for new forms of classification was far from uniform in its outcomes. It also set on its way the spread of racialist explanations. In tracing these lines of descent into the twentieth-century, Kidd provides a wealth of stimulating comment on the relations between biblical study, slavery, ethnology, language study, religious affiliation and physiology. At all times there have been protagonists of beliefs anxious to claim biblical justification for their interpretation of the world and its proper ordering. At the same time ‘Racialised religion’ has been as much a feature of white as of black and coloured world views. Thus Kidd examines groups as diverse as the British Israelites and Mormons as well as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Black Judaism. Important for what it says on the significance of studying theology in context, this work deserves to attract a large readership well outside religious history. Both it and its audience also deserve a better index.