In a little-known work, Tom Paine held Freemasonry to be the descendant of an ancient form of sun worship secretly practiced by Egyptian priests and Persian magi (The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4 [New York: Putnam, 1896], 290–303). The monotheism at the core of this esoteric solar religion later became known to the wider world as the corrupted “parody” we know as Christianity. That the author of The Age of Reason should have found in Masonic mythology a club with which to beat traditional religion is not surprising. But a self-styled proponent of “Common Sense” should surely have known better than to maintain—with apparent sincerity—that Druidic intermediaries transmitted the solar religion of antiquity to the modern Masonic lodges of his native England. The drive to adorn cold rationalism with invented tradition formed a strong undercurrent of Enlightenment culture right down to its end. It never died among the Freemasons, who today still claim several million members worldwide.

Tom Paine is not mentioned in Jessica Harland-Jacobs's new history of Freemasonry in the British Empire, although he might well have been. Born in England, a key figure in the American Revolution, and a delegate to the French National Assembly, Paine embodied the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. He was not a Mason. But by the end of the nineteenth century, Britons like him traced routes of international exchange spreading Freemasonry not only to Europe and the Americas but wherever Britain's regiments, colonists, merchants, diplomats, and exiles could be found—all over the globe, in places as diverse as Canada and Australia, India and South Africa, and Istanbul and Hong Kong.

Harland-Jacobs shows eighteenth-century Freemasonry to have been a remarkably elastic fraternal institution, embracing men (but outside continental Europe, never women) of various political opinions, religious inclinations, and social classes. But during the age of revolution, Freemasonry lost this diversity as the British mobilized against foreign enemies and domestic threats. Masons became more overtly loyalist—indeed royalist—and Protestant and more intent on admitting only “respectable” brothers. And even when they later let in nonwhites, they found ways to uphold prevailing racial hierarchies. The Craft, in short, both conformed to and reinforced the wider nineteenth-century trends acting to consolidate and spread the British Empire internationally. Harland-Jacobs offers a functionalist explanation for Freemasonry's role in the empire's growth and transformation. “By fulfilling a variety of needs—ranging from homosocial association to easing men's transition from one colonial society to another—belonging to the fraternity made life easier for Britons who ran, defended, and lived in the empire” (3–4). As such, the lodge was “instrumental in lubricating … [the] administrative, military, and commercial networks on which Britain's power was based” (13).

Harland-Jacobs's first three chapters, on the eighteenth century, integrate into a broadly British perspective previous work, dealing with England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and North America in isolation. These chapters constitute not so much a new synthesis as a running revision and expansion of the existing historiography. So, for example, the schism between “Modern” and “Ancient” lodges in North America, ably traced by Steven Bullock to tensions between upper- and lower-middle-class constituencies, also reflected English Masons’ competition with rival Irish lodges back in the British Isles (22–31). Similarly, Harland-Jacobs fleshes out the well-known role of military lodges in transplanting Freemasonry to new imperial outposts (32–37), updates our understanding of the Craft's spread from Britain to France by revealing its connections to the Jacobite diaspora (104–7), and impressively documents lodges’ roles as institutional models (and sometimes actual political cells) among Irish radicals of the 1790s (120–27).

Heavy reliance on secondary sources, and on rereadings of canonical primary sources (e.g., the Masonic Charges and Constitutions of the 1720s), hampers her investigation until the end of chapter 3, however, when Harland-Jacobs begins more systematically to exploit new archival material illuminating British Freemasonry's ongoing nineteenth-century transformation. Chapters 4–7 turn squarely to the non-European world, drawing from the largely untapped archives of Grand Lodges in London and Dublin, which were in communication with brethren worldwide. Here her functionalist inclinations come to the fore. Methodologically, Harland-Jacobs tends to seek common denominators rather than to isolate revealing differences across the empire's vastly divergent colonies and social landscapes—which included a penal colony in Australia, islands with large populations of (ex-) slaves in the Caribbean, regions of intra-European ethnic rivalry in English-French Canada and English-Dutch South Africa, and imperial outposts with sophisticated non-European elites in South Asia. In all of these places, Harland-Jacobs finds Freemasonry performing much the same roles. Despite numerous conflicts between its universalist ideology and its exclusionary practices, the lodge is invariably shown to reinforce the hierarchies and imperatives of empire. Yet in one obvious instance British Masons manifestly did not serve British interests: the United States, which drops out of Harland-Jacobs's comparative analysis at the moment it attains independence. Within her conceptual framework, British imperialism and the general diffusion of British culture can therefore hardly be distinguished.

Because she aims so consistently to show Freemasons as “builders of empire,” Harland-Jacobs ultimately cannot explain the autonomy and influence of the Craft as an institution in its own right. A less functionalist approach, and one more attuned to culture and contestation, might have helped to depict with greater nuance and complexity what Freemasonry actually meant to its members. Here is where the analysis of figures like Tom Paine would have proved so useful. To him and many others, the Craft was more than a club. Without understanding Masonry's ritual, spiritual, religious, or popular-scientific content, it is impossible to account for its vitality as a cultural institution apart from its subservience to external social and political forces. Such an approach might also have enabled Harland-Jacobs to address a cardinal question raised by her own case study: how those of British descent could transplant themselves so rapidly and so thoroughly to colonies across the entire globe and not become deracinated as a result. Freemasonry is a perfect place to begin tackling this question.