The last two decades have witnessed a gradual and variegated global turn in the history of Protestantism. Marshalling the methodological tools of global history, this edited volume fruitfully draws disparate threads of scholarship into a more coherent platform for research. As Ulinka Rublack explains, investigating ‘multi-centric’ religious change ‘across Western and non-Western worlds’ (p. 1) freshly illuminates the pluralities of the Reformations. As well as contributing to the disruption of national and Euro-centric historiographies, the collection transcends self-contained assessments of trans-Atlantic Puritanism, and re-evaluates Protestant missionary activities, which have often been overshadowed by Catholic endeavours. Far from excluding or minimising Europe and the Atlantic world, however, ‘globalising’ here involves integrating these regions into new interpretative frameworks as well as venturing beyond them by tracing ‘identities and knowledge inflected with the global’ (p. 29). Despite the volume's title, the concept of ‘empires’ is only intermittently subject to overt critical analysis. Nevertheless, the unmistakably expansionist and hegemonic impulses of Protestantism are palpable throughout twelve chapters that reveal the entanglement of evangelism with enslavement; market forces with new media; reciprocity with resistance. Migration, space, materiality and emotion are shown to have constituted spiritual experiences that could expand or diminish religious power across local, cross-regional and transnational boundaries. Moreover, innovations in reading and writing, scholarship and memory, experimentation and translation, reflected and profoundly shaped Christian and non-Christian lives. Repudiating linear narratives of progress towards modernity, the volume rightly acknowledges global processes of instability, fragmentation and failure that developed in conjunction with connectivity, circulation, exchange and networks.

These dynamics are immediately evident in the chapters on seventeenth-century British America. Carla Gardina Pestana excavates sedimentary layers of national mythologisation that have obscured the growing pains of the Plymouth plantation from 1620 onwards. The enduring tensions of the European Reformation conspired with challenges typical of other religious migrations to preclude the kind of separatist purity often associated with the settlement, which was more moderate than is often supposed. Meanwhile, David D. Hall considers godly preoccupations that developed in Stuart England and adapted to a ‘different geography of religion’ (p. 72) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As Anthony Grafton demonstrates, the Reformed humanist reading practices of intra-European, trans-Atlantic learned circles also informed debates about theology, witchcraft, medicine and race in this colony. Treading new paths across familiar territory, these chapters highlight the continuities and contingencies of religious cultures in the Atlantic world. Taking a different route to North America, Neil Kamil assiduously traces the fortunes of a Huguenot family that adapted to new locales in France, England and Virginia by harnessing the socio-economic power of ‘inventive genius’ (p. 106) and appropriating a ‘material-holiness tradition’ (p. 117) of noble artisanry across multiple generations.

Connections between materiality and spirituality also underpin Susanna Burghartz's chapter, which is the first of several striking contributions to explore Protestant interactions with non-Christianity. It examines the balancing act of the de Bry family in producing economically viable travel literature between 1560 and 1630 that allowed people ‘to see and purchase the whole world from the comfort of home’ (p. 154). Representing a ‘Calvinist coding of the European pictorial archive of early globalization’ (p. 176), these works simultaneously condemned idolatry and celebrated visual depictions of divine creation. Situating Dutch Calvinism in the context of empire, economic expansion and evangelism, Charles H. Parker measures the fluidity of Protestant engagement with Islam, suggesting that expectations of widespread Muslim conversion to Christianity in south-east Asia were dashed during the seventeenth century, giving way thereafter to increasingly sensitive interest in Islamic texts and theology as well as a robust campaign of scriptural translation. Meanwhile, Renate Dürr illuminates German Lutheran sermons produced for the ritualised baptism of Muslim and African people. Offering glimpses into non-Christian beliefs and experiences while reaffirming Christian universalism, these sermons reflected ‘a particularly Lutheran manner of appropriating the world’ (p. 221) that facilitated local engagement with global processes. Focusing on the pastor Johann Martin Boltzius (1703–65) in colonial Georgia, James Van Horn Melton reveals the ambitions and frustrations that attended Pietist efforts to convert Jewish settlers, indigenous peoples and enslaved African peoples. Emphasising the role of millenarian beliefs in galvanising Pietist evangelism in south-east India, Ulrike Gleixner describes a ‘Kingdom-of-God-economy’ (p. 273), in which European sponsorship of missionary work became a form of active participation in a global eschatological drama.

Scrutinising the social, cultural and legal possibilities that global Protestantism afforded and foreclosed to non-Europeans, two chapters about Moravian missions uncover modes of reception and cooperation alongside defiance, obfuscation and suppression. As Jacqueline Van Gent argues, conversion depended on the performance of particular emotional structures that tied love of Christ to the heart and body. This could invite non-European participation and mobility, as evident in the late eighteenth-century memoir of Maria Magdalena. The daughter of an enslaved woman, Magdalena was baptised in India, and subsequently travelled to Germany and the West Indies, before retiring to Denmark. The same emotional framework could become a source of friction between Moravians and Inuit communities in Labrador, Canada, reflecting local opposition to evangelism and European authority. Jon Sensbach re-examines the case of Mary Prince, whose autobiographical account of her experiences as an enslaved person in Bermuda and the Caribbean was published in 1831. Representing ‘an exercise in code-switching’ (p. 317), the text deployed strategies of omission and selectivity alongside appeals to original sin and providentialism, thereby asserting spirituality, promoting abolitionism and celebrating evangelism, while obscuring Moravian complicity with enslavement.

Concluding the volume, Merry Wiesner-Hanks reflects on the history of emotions, the spatial turn and ‘the inclusion of a wider range of actors’ in research (p. 321). Integrating and developing these areas, this kaleidoscopic volume represents a confident intervention in scholarship, offering new vantage points from which to discover the intellectual and cultural contours and trajectories of the Reformations. It also generates momentum by suggesting new directions in the global history of Protestantism. While embracing adjustable scales and lenses, it sees global history as more than an exercise in geographical recalibration. At once demanding introspection and eschewing provincialism, Protestant empires reconstructs connected and contested worlds, and in so doing reaffirms the need to think globally.