As the title indicates, this book is a survey and analysis of the comparatively large-scale, for its overall population, New Zealand-based mission societies and missionaries. Although its title points to the book covering the century, from 1827 to 1939, in fact most of the book is about the period from the late-nineteenth century when New Zealand-based mission societies began in earnest. The presentation of these missions as reflecting a broad Evangelicalism in New Zealand is correct. However, this generalisation rather obscures the different culture and ecclesiology of the High Church Anglican Melanesian Mission and the minority Anglo-Catholic contribution of that Church's missions. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the plethora of scholarly attention that the Protestant mission movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has received from historians in the last decades, this work is a welcome addition to that corpus. The author substantiates his view that mission in New Zealand was as much nationally as internationally derived, and is a warning against too much global generalisation in assessing missions in this period. More particularly, the argument of the book that overseas missions were an integral dimension in the development of New Zealand settler identity is a useful corrective to the lack of attention to religion in James Belich's important work on New Zealand history and the emergence of a British world that has already been taken up by Hilary Carey. It also redresses the lack of attention to the significance of religion, and religion in a British imperial context, in the colonial histories of New Zealand and Australia that this reviewer and other scholars have pointed to. In that regard, the attention of the book to theology as well as to the structures and policies of New Zealand overseas missions is also an important dimension of understanding mission that has, at times, been poorly addressed by the existing scholarship. Consequently, this book has a historiographical significance for both colonial and mission history beyond its national subject.