This valuable work, which appears in the Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories series, is a reworking of the author's Cambridge doctoral dissertation in the history and philosophy of science. As an example of the innovative interdisciplinary social history to which the series is committed, the book well deserves to be reviewed in this Journal, for it throws much light on the aims and achievements of the first Protestant missionaries in the Pacific region. Sivasundaram has not only meticulously delved into the archives of the London Missionary Society wherever they are to be found throughout the world, but has also developed methods of analysing the material culture of early nineteenth-century evangelicals (one immediate sign of this is the relative profusion, in an academic work, of illustrations), and for uncovering ‘theology from below’, using a wealth of contemporary popular writings. He demonstrates that the evangelicals associated with the LMS were closely allied with the natural scientists of the period, especially agronomists like Joseph Banks and Arthur Young, and expounded what Sivasundaram calls ‘a theology of nature’ (to be distinguished sharply from the ‘natural theology’ of other contemporary figures like William Paley). Accordingly we meet leading figures among the LMS missionaries like John Williams surveying the islands and coral reefs of the Pacific, or William Ellis instructing their South Sea hearers to observe natural phenomena in order to understand God's designs, and thus be liberated from being merely part of nature. By adopting such ideas these evangelicals made themselves men of science long before the concept of the ‘scientist’ came into full usage. Sivasundaram's book is a mine of new or off-the-beaten-track information in this area: for example John Williams's observations of coral reefs were used by Charles Darwin, and the two were acquainted with one another. This fact seems nowhere to have been mentioned by Darwin himself. This ‘theology of nature’ or ‘missionary natural history’ coexisted with the incipient colonial urges of the period. The Pacific islands, one contemporary wrote in 1823, cried out ‘for the introduction of the arts of civilized life, and in connection with them, for the great engines of moral improvement, education and the Bible’. This writer thought this necessarily implied a partial colonisation, both with teachers and artisans. Evangelical missionaries understood themselves exactly in this way as representatives of ‘godly empire’. From the beginning the missionary personnel sent from London included numerous practical people, like carpenters and gardeners and shipbuilders. Their activities on the Pacific islands were undertaken as a demonstration of the theology of nature. As a result this book offers a corrective to simplistic suggestions that the theory of evolution justified imperialism, or that colonialisation want hand-in-hand with the alleged secularising processes of science. Sivasundaram's work is rich and complex and touches many other aspects of the nineteenth century. It would appear to be essential reading for the historian of Christian expansion seeking to interpret a particularly complex phase in Christian history (what David Bosch memorably called ‘mission in the wake of the enlightenment’), for the missiologist reflecting on the cross-cultural communication of the Gospel; and, to be sure, for any student of British Christianity in the early nineteenth century.