This engaging study by Tolly Bradford takes the recent historiographical turn that has emphasized the transregional aspects of Christian missions during the colonial era (perhaps best exemplified by the work of Andrew Porter) and grounds it in the biographies of two exceptional mid-nineteenth century individuals located on the margins of the British Empire. Henry Budd, a Cree-speaking Christian of British North-West America, and Tiyo Soga, an early Xhosa convert living along the Cape Colony frontier, shared both a commitment to the spread of evangelical Christian modernity and a belief that this should occur within the context of their indigenous identities.

For Budd and Soga this meant forging a new indigeneity. Both converted to Christianity as young men, became missionaries for their new faith, embraced British modernity, and yet fostered a nascent nationality rooted in their indigenous languages, the history of their peoples, and the lands of their birth. For Bradford, one of the keys to understanding this potential paradox is found in the global networks created by Christianity which engendered a sense of responsibility for the spiritual and temporal welfare of their respective peoples, but also allowed these men to connect with faithful in other colonized lands and in England itself. This was not the ‘colonization of consciousness’, an idea historians have all but demolished over the last two decades. Bradford acknowledges that colonial power and violence shaped much in the worlds Budd and Soga moved in, but argues forcefully that it was through their own agency that their identity as ‘transfrontier’ indigenous missionaries emerged. As such they were central to the growth of nascent Christian communities along the British frontier.

Henry Budd was born in the shadow of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) and after his father's early death, his mother sent the eight-year-old to be raised in a Church Mission Society (CMS) school in 1820 before she herself converted. After coming of age the young Cree man returned to work for the HBC, underwent his own conversion, returned to the CMS mission, and in 1850 became the first ordained indigenous missionary of British North-West America. Tiyo Soga's trajectory was remarkably similar. Born to the father of a minor Xhosa nobleman in 1829, he moved with his mother after her conversion to a mission station before he was ten and from there enrolled at Lovedale Seminary in 1844. Within two years, Soga's remarkable abilities were clear and, when Lovedale was forced closed by the brutal ‘War of the Axe’ in 1846, the young Xhosa man travelled to Scotland to complete his teacher training, joined the United Presbyterian Church, and was baptized into the faith. Both men spent the remainder of their lives struggling to come to terms with what it meant to be both native and Christian.

Bradford emphasizes the many links between Budd and Soga in the structure of his book. After the introduction, each receives a chapter devoted to his early life, but the heart of this study lies in the three subsequent chapters focusing on their liminal position and the ways they overcame their outsider status in both indigenous and European communities. Here the author successfully drives home his central argument that the intertwining of evangelical Christianity and modernity produced indigenous Christian communities throughout the British Empire that shared much in common and must be considered within the context of the global missionary project. Bradford returns to the individual narratives for two final chapters before the conclusion and it is in the last chapter on Soga that one weakness of this otherwise excellent work emerges. In comparison with Budd, Soga was an intensely public figure deeply invested in the politics of the Cape frontier and Bradford struggles to escape the orbit of this legacy. That Soga was a proto-nationalist who embraced the core values of British modernity is clear; what remains unclear, however, is what Christianity meant to Soga outside of this secular context. This opaqueness is highlighted by the clarity of Budd's faith; for example, a year after his wife and two of his children died from scarlet fever in 1864, he wrote that it was only his conviction in Christ that kept him from cutting himself open to let his blood run freely with his grief. Despite Bradford's impressive hunt through the archives of the Eastern Cape and beyond, no such insight into Soga's spirituality emerges in these pages and without this one is left to wonder if their Christian faith was as comparable as their commitment to an indigenous identity based on modernity. Still, this is an inarguably valuable work whose comparative approach highlights the ways converts accessed and employed global networks created by mission and empire to actively build the world around them.