Over the past twenty years, one of the dominant paradigms in the study of the early modern period has been furnished by Atlantic history. Inspired by Fernand Braudel's approach to the Mediterranean as a complex social, political and geographical unit, Atlanticists have breathed new life into the study of the interactions and peoples that were linked by a ring of coasts. Like all good paradigms, this one has its critics: some dismiss it as repackaged imperial history; others question how the Atlantic can be separated from other geographical standpoints, namely the Pacific. More recently, scholars such as David Armitage have called for a new “big history”: trans-temporal, international, and global. Notwithstanding, no one could deny that the scholarly dividends of the Atlantic approach are substantial, especially in cases where a particular historical subject has been conventionally confined within parochial national boundaries.

Travis Glasson offers a detailed examination of the activities and ethos of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). The key organizing concept in the study is “missionary Anglicanism,” which here denotes an approach to religion that was outward looking, and which sought to preserve links between church and state. For many historians of English religion, the Anglican Church is something of a foil to a neat narrative of the progressive development of religious toleration, disestablishment, and a harmonious relationship between a voluntarist religion and a non-confessional state. Glasson demonstrates how Anglicanism remained a powerful presence on the stage, and how it served to shape some key debates in the Atlantic world between 1700 and 1838.

In short, the SPG envisioned the Church of England as a global enterprise, and the point of its mission was to ensure that Christian society (of colonies and plantations) was Godly and orderly. Since the early stages of English colonization, the conversion of “heathen” was the vital means of bringing this about. For example, an act for promoting the gospel in New England in 1649 noted that conversion of the “Heathen Natives” would lay the foundation for “Colonies in a desolate Wilderness.” It turns out that this was a durable impulse, and this book shows the many ways in which it was applied in a struggle against dissent at home, “popery” and growing post-Awakening evangelicalism in the colonies. Moreover, people in the colonies lived and functioned within a transatlantic network of political, military and economic systems, and so an additional rationale for missionary Anglicanism was to ensure that the English members of this settler society did not stray from the national fold.

To tell this story, Glasson has probed more deeply than any previous historian into the archives of the SPG, integrating these with a wide array of contemporary printed sources, including of large number of sermons. He is as adept at charting the complexities of theological discourse as he is in presenting a compact portrait of the plantation economies of the Atlantic world. The book is divided into four parts. It begins by framing the ideological foundations of the SPG and its formation as an organization. Not only were its members engaged in the daily work of catechizing and converting, they were also engaged in debates about the origins of human difference. As Colin Kidd has taught us, early moderns approached race as a cultural rather than biological concept, and there was no clearer indicator of culture than religion. These questions found their way into Society catechisms, one of which asked slaves to consider “what sort of Creatures” they were and “From whom they received their Being,” (57). Sometimes, this question was moot, since the Bible had long been used to construct an ethno-genesis that proposed that indigenous and African peoples were remnants of the lost tribes of Israel, or perhaps descendants of Noah's son, Ham. Glasson reveals that the SPG blended experience in plantation slavery with European debates on the origins and nature of peoples, seeing them as part of the same enterprise.

Part 2 is concerned with the SPG's involvement with the conversion of slaves and its close associations with colonial slavery itself. It was particularly active in Virginia, South Carolina and Barbados—and it happened that all of these Anglican colonies were also economically dependent upon slavery. Here, the Society adopted a paternalistic approach to the slaves, and was attentive to issues of welfare; however, the SPG also owned slaves, and hence found itself appealing to masters with the reassurance that conversion was not the first step toward emancipation. The wider effect of this stance, Glasson argues, was that the SPG “served to bolster slavery's moral acceptability around the British Atlantic world” (138).

Part 3 looks closely at two loci of missionary activity. Codrington plantation in Barbados was conferred to the SPG as part of a bequest by Christopher Codrington, the governor general of the Leeward Islands (a similar bequest paid for the foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford). While the plantation generated profits that helped the Society to pursue its mission, the paradox was not lost on one observer who lamented the “thick cloud of intellectual darkness spread over so great a part of the creation” (169). The second point of activity was the Cape Coast in West Africa, a principal point of departure for slaves bound for the Atlantic. There, Philip Quaque—the first African minister ordained in the Church of England—worked for fifty years alongside the Company of Merchants, in an attempt to square the circle of slavery and African conversion. His failure represents the first signs of a shift toward abolitionism (195).

The final chapter takes up the involvement of the SPG in the context of a burgeoning anti-slavery movement; while some members were sympathetic to the growing chorus calling for reform, there remained a stubborn core who defended slavery and used the SPG's own track record as the foundation of the argument. They felt, as Glasson notes in his conclusion, that the “process of ‘civilizing’ and Christianizing black people” would be “long and difficult,” (240). No happy endings here, to be sure. Nevertheless, Mastering Christianity presents a deeply informative account of contemporary beliefs and activities; it is both rigorously researched and clearly (and dispassionately) argued. Broadly speaking, it adds perspective to how Anglicanism has struggled to adapt to historical change, and one suspects that the stalwarts of the SPG would be surprised by the Church's modern demographics.