In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford in 1857, Arthur Penryhn Stanley exulted in the expansion of the ‘thin stream’ of ecclesiastical history into ‘the vast field of the history of the world’. ‘The Christian Church’ had become ‘merely another name for Christendom; and Christendom soon becomes merely another name for the most civilised, the most powerful, the most important nations of the modern habitable world.’ The days when ‘ecclesiastical’ and ‘civil’ history could be separated, when ecclesiastical historians could dwell on ‘the abolition of vestments’ rather than ‘the abolition of the slave-trade’, were over. Providence and empire, part of the Longman series on Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, fulfils Stanley's mission statement on two levels: it exemplifies the virtues of looking beyond the deanery window and it explores precisely that high noon of Victorian Christendom to which Stanley referred – but without the triumphalism. In what reads like the book's defining chapter, ‘Commerce, Christianity and civilisation, 1840–1863’, Brown renders the mentality of providential imperialism with consummate neutrality. The hubris of Christian ‘free-traders’ who begged the state to use force to open markets to ‘Providence’ is allowed to speak for itself. Quoting John Bowring, a Manchester businessman who became governor of Hong Kong in 1854, and who believed that ‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ’, Brown adds: ‘For a growing number of British Christians, commerce and Christianity were part of God's plan for the regeneration and conversion of Africa and Asia’ (pp. 145, 146). Similarly, Richard Cobden's faith in trade as ‘God's diplomacy’, the ‘grand panacea’ for the world, is an idea allowed to breathe. Some readers would prefer more deconstruction and critique, no doubt, but the breathtaking scope and ambition of the Christian ‘mission’ is conveyed very powerfully without such hand-wringing. Another virtue of the book is the combination of detailed discussion of the Churches with wider social and political issues. Historians have closed the gap between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in the past twenty to thirty years, but they have sometimes spoken of religion as a vaguely Hegelian ‘presence’ – influential but somehow disembodied. Brown's opening chapters on evangelicalism, the national Churches and ‘the waning of the church-state connection’ avoid this error. Subsequent themes of revivalism, the liberalisation of doctrine, and the emergence of ‘social Christianity’ in the second half of the century are solidly contextualised. I know of no single text that can move so seamlessly from discussions of church polity to the dramas of Gladstonian Liberalism, from High Church incarnationalism to the effervescence of the Welsh Revival. This points to another strength of the book: the scale of the coverage. Jewish emancipation and the rise of secularism are handled with equal dexterity. I would like to have seen more on the theme of gender as raised in the recent historiography, but this is to look for a weakness. One could also wish for a more searching conclusion, but as a guide to the pomp and circumstance of Victorian Christianity with none of the defects of the subject matter, this book is exceptional.