The importance of this book is illustrated by its final chapter, a study of some mission initiatives led by Fr Richard Meux Benson, the founder and first superior of the Cowley Fathers. At a time (the 1850s to 1870s) when the Evangelicalism of CMS was dominating missionary work across the British Empire, work that was often implicated in colonial cultural assumptions and sometimes directly with colonial power, Benson saw the need for instigating missions away from the centres of power and cultural influence. He argued for the missionary living an ascetic life in small and poor communities in which the authenticity of their life of prayer would plant Christianity in genuine ways: mission and ascetic spirituality would go together. The missionary would have a lifestyle similar to that of the people being served. In early life, Benson had wanted to become a missionary in India but had been prevented from doing so. He was then influenced by Edward Pusey, the leader of the Oxford Movement, who had demonstrated commitment to mission among the urban poor in Britain in his sponsoring of St Saviour’s in Leeds, a church plant in an urban slum served by a small community of missionary priests. When the Cowley Fathers had become established in Oxford, they then decided that he should encourage similar initiatives but further afield in India. He guided one of his novices, Samuel Wilberforce O’Neill, to do just this, discouraging the building of schools and clinics and encouraging him to the religious life in ways consonant with Hindu dharma (religion). Nehemiah Goreh, a Brahman convert to Christianity, became a formative influence on O’Neill, resulting in the Indian as well as the European formation of the community. O’Neill’s community was based in a small local house in Indore, and he lived simply, sleeping on the floor behind the altar, eating local food using his hand and overseeing charitable work with lepers and other outcasts in the town. He would die of cholera at Indore a few years later. Rowan Strong’s final chapter tells the story of this short but powerful episode in mission history, one which prefigured Bede Griffiths immersion in Hindu culture in the 1950s.

Strong shows why the ‘hybrid marginality’ of this approach to mission is so important: ‘the early diversity in these early Anglo-Catholic missions to India is a reminder that not only did missions vary in a whole range of their perspectives and local forms, but also the Christianity they advocated and propagated was not a monolithic phenomenon. There is a greater need in the study of missions to delineate the varied characteristics of the Christianity that diverse missions propagated, including their theological and devotional beliefs. Mission Christianity was a much more multivalent phenomenon than the study of what has come to be known as ‘Christian mission’ would suggest by that all too monochromatic term’. (p. 271)

Other chapters range widely over global Anglicanism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular attention to High Church and Anglo-Catholic traditions. They begin with the remarkable figure of Thomas Bray, the founder of SPCK and SPG, who saw education as the doorway to Christian belief, and then examine the difficult connections of SPG with British imperialism. The book also tells the story of High Church pressure on the East India Company to allow missionary work in India at the time of the renewal of its charter in 1812-13, showing that it was not only Evangelicals who pulled their weight in this way. The creation of the Colonial Bishopric’s Fund in 1840-1 is shown as the moment when High Church Anglicans recognized the need to be proactive in establishing episcopal ministry across the world because the British state was never going to be: it signified the arrival of a new global paradigm for Anglicanism. There are also chapters on the relationship of church and state in Western Australia (where Strong has been based as a historian) between 1827 and 1857, with a particular focus on lay Anglicans. Moving back to the northern hemisphere, there is discussion of the impact of High Church slum ministry in Glasgow between 1845 and 1851 and the complicated relationship of the Oxford Movement with the British Empire. The next chapter returns to the southern hemisphere with a study of Bishop George Selwyn while in New Zealand and his influential correspondence with British government figures, such as Gladstone, whom he knew from university days. Strong also recalls that while Selwyn was a supporter of the Maori Anglican community, he ended up supporting armed intervention to quash a Maori rebellion. There is an important chapter on the place of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the expansion of Anglicanism in the nineteenth century, before the final chapter mentioned above on Benson and others.

This is not a comprehensive survey of the relationship of Anglicanism, mission and empire, but a set of detailed and fresh studies that open up the field in illuminating ways. The book is the fruit of over two decades of original research, and it has the authority that goes with that. It explodes a number of stereotypes in a perennially contested field and cannot be ignored.