Over the course of the eighteenth century around 250,000 Irish Protestants moved to America, with many settling initially as indentured labourers in the backcountry of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. This phenomenon gave rise to a transatlantic migrant culture that was readily conditioned by printed news and propaganda, especially from the Presbyterian inflected Belfast News-Letter (est. 1737). This cultural matrix was formative in constructing and disseminating partisan opinion during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), which, in oversimplified terms, not only pitted Britain against France, but Protestantism against Catholicism. In this context, it is perhaps not too surprising that a sense of popular British imperialism was to be found amongst the Scots Irish diaspora before the more awkward intra-Protestant conflict of the American Revolution. But how exactly did this occur? Benjamin Bankhurst's short, tightly focused monograph – which is based upon his 2011 doctoral thesis – builds upon Patrick Griffin's The people with no name (2001) and Vincent Morely's Irish opinion and the American Revolution (2002), to offer some shrewd answers. The Belfast News-Letter was instrumental in cultivating a set of inclusive, providentially inspired, responses to news about the plight of Protestants at home and abroad. More crucially, it represented the violent actions of ‘Indians’ at the American frontier in a distinctly gruesome fashion to evoke parallels with the 1641 Irish Rebellion in a new era of sensibility, thus furthering an anti-Catholic impulse in the mind of Irish Protestants. And, set against this backdrop, at least two Presbyterian charitable funds based in the American colonies found support amongst their confessional kinfolk back in Ireland. Taking these points together, Bankhurst also makes a bolder overarching claim: that during the crisis of the Seven Years’ War, popular British imperialism was significantly bolstered by a transatlantic ‘sense of empathy among Ulster Presbyterians’. Whilst sensitive to the current pressure to publish one's first monograph, some of the weaknesses associated with rushing such a venture are all too apparent in Bankhurst's book. The tight focus leaves plenty of relevant history and historiography unexplored and leads to an analytical mode which is fairly limited in scope. Notwithstanding a well-conceived chapter on Presbyterian fundraising, readers of this Journal may be disappointed, even frustrated, by a relatively weak appreciation of Ulster Presbyterians qua Presbyterianism; much of Bankhurst's discussion seems surreptitiously to rely upon recourse to the more baggy collective of the ‘Scots Irish’. A broader and deeper understanding of Calvinist theology, intra-Presbyterian controversy, and the socio-political history of both non-Episcopalian Protestants and international Protestantism in the post-1689 British Empire would all have helped here. Much would have been gained by engaging with Thomas Kidd's The Protestant interest (2004) and Colin Kidd's British identities before nationalism (2006). Furthermore, Bankhurst's analysis is overly reliant upon the casual deployment of buzzwords (for example, ‘imagination’, ‘public opinion’, ‘networks’, ‘memory’ and ‘empathy’) naively pilfered from the cultural historian's tool box. Bankhurst's principal claim about empathy is flawed: the specific concept-term ‘empathy’ would have been an anachronism in the eighteenth century, and Bankhurst shows no real interest in appropriating the subsequent cognitive theory as an interpretative tool. All this stands in stark contrast to the more credible reconstruction of transatlantic Calvinist ‘fellow feeling’ in Abram Van Engen's Sympathetic Puritans (2015). Whilst unduly limited and, at key moments, unconvincing, Bankhurst's book is still an informative and pleasingly suggestive study.