Richard Bailey's book has an ambitious agenda: he aims to explain the development of racism in New England through the contradictions within Puritan doctrine and behaviour, and thus to push the emergence of racism back to the seventeenth century. But his effort is undermined by imprecision: Bailey does not adequately define his terms or provide contemporary context, and he too often assigns static meanings to attitudes and processes that changed over time. His use of the term ‘Puritanism’ is a case in point. Bailey rightly notes that Puritanism was a difficult-to-define movement, not a religion, but his definition seems overly capacious: he includes Anglicans among ‘the many Protestants we can describe as puritans’ (p. 20), gives examples of Puritan ‘theology’ that properly belong to more narrowly-defined religious traditions or social norms, and applies the term to two centuries of New England Churches regardless of the radical changes and religious divisions that took place over that period. More problematic is Bailey's decision to deal with the experience of African and Native Americans together as ‘people of color’. For Native New Englanders, Christian missionisation and enslavement were largely seventeenth-century experiences. For African New Englanders, they were largely eighteenth-century ones. Bailey tells the two stories together, jumping back and forth between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources without adequately exploring differences between African and Native American experiences, which were substantial. Few New England Native Americans were enslaved relative to the larger Indian population. Those who were, were primarily war captives freed after a term of years. By the start of the eighteenth century, indenture or apprenticeship had largely replaced slavery as a labour system among the greatly diminished Indian population. For Africans, the trajectory was reversed. As late as 1708 only 550 Africans resided in New England. Their numbers – and the institution of chattel slavery – grew ten-fold in the eighteenth century (p. 26). By discussing Africans and Native Americans together, Bailey muddles these different trajectories and creates a static picture of New England race relations. For instance, he uses the Puritan minister Cotton Mather as an exemplar of negative Puritan beliefs about Indians, failing to note that Mather came of age after the period that Native American historians see as the transition from ethnocentrism to institutionalised racism. Thus, Bailey misses an opportunity to demonstrate the nuances in the emergence of racism, not just its existence. Bailey's search for the religious roots of racism is worthwhile: we would expect belief to influence contemporary attitudes and actions. But to be persuasive, such a study would require more precise definitions, numerical and contextual comparisons, and attention to change over time.