This well-conceived, lucid and finely written volume fills a gap in the scholarship on Christian missions in Africa. John Stuart chronicles the ups and downs of British Protestant missionary societies as the Great Depression, World War II, post-war economic development and the scramble to decolonise buffeted their operations with unprecedented gales. There was not a single year when they could conduct business as usual. Contradictory tendencies and competing political forces pulled at them from all sides. White settlers in Kenya and the Rhodesias, powerfully reinforced by the fledgling apartheid regime in South Africa, fought to maintain segregation in the Churches while demanding that missionaries stay out of politics. African nationalists complained that staying out of politics would be perceived on their side as a hostile political act. Colonial governors in various British territories pursued divergent policies, some friendly and some antagonistic to the missions. At the apex of governance, the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Colonial Office proved generally indifferent to mission voices (unless they emanated from Lambeth Palace). Meanwhile, within the missions advocates of competing tendencies argued for policies on African advancement ranging from resistance to the wholesale displacement of white authority. Using well-chosen case studies, Stuart demonstrates that no broad generalisations can be made about missions and the end of empire. Individuals and circumstances made a huge difference to outcomes. The author's character sketches and handling of complex narratives are deft and illuminating. His treatment of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya, the formation and dissolution of the Central African Federation and the crisis sparked by Seretse Khama's marriage to the Englishwoman, Ruth Williams, attest to his skill at historical analysis. Despite the impressive geographical and chronological scope of the book, it does not purport to deliver the last word on its important subject. The thousands of non-British missionaries at work in the region are excluded from the narrative, as are the Roman Catholics. Stuart also risks conveying a false impression of the sophistication of the missions by concentrating heavily on the well-established mainline British Protestant societies. Voices from the mission field and from African agents are distantly heard, if at all. The emphasis on mission leadership, on those who bore the brunt of confrontations with governments, is understandable, but it does leave much work to be done on an under-researched era in mission history. Stuart's achievement is to have pointed the way forward with a book that will be a must-read for those who follow.