In present-day Meghalaya, a state in northeastern India, the official language is English, a testimony to the successful labors of several generations of the very self-consciously Welsh missionaries of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society. Meghalaya was the biggest overseas commitment of Welsh missionaries. Thomas Jones, the first of the society's missionaries—and ancestor of Andrew May, the author of Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-East India—arrived in 1841 in the Khasi Hills lying between Sylhet in modern-day Bangladesh and Assam in India. The last Welsh missionaries departed in the 1960s, leaving behind a region where, according to the most recent census, Christians made up 70 percent of the population (as compared to 2.3 percent of India as a whole). It is also one of the wettest places on the planet. Difficult to traverse, densely forested, and inundated with rains, the Khasi Hills had historically evaded deeper cultural, social, and political integration into the Indo-Gangetic Plains to the west. Consequently, Hinduism and Islam had not imprinted themselves so deeply into local communities, making the area a much more tempting field for Christian missionaries. In a deliciously ironic twist, the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society had been founded in large degree as a reaction to the prejudicial treatment by the London Missionary Society of Welsh volunteers like Jones, who were deemed ill suited to proselytizing in India due to deficiencies in their command of English. May speculates that the Welsh missionaries may in fact have flourished because of, rather than despite, their bilingualism. Recent work on multilingualism would seem to bear this out.

May's The Empire of Clouds, however, is more than a fascinating account of missionary activity. As befits yet another excellent addition to Manchester University Press's Studies in Imperialism series, which has been so instrumental in defining and driving what has come to be called the New Imperial History, Empire of Clouds carefully uncovers dynamic tensions within imperialism and explores the myriad relationships linking Wales and Meghalaya. Readers are treated to his wonderfully nuanced and sympathetic reading of the interplay between what are in many ways marginal communities in British India and Great Britain: “As a cultural historian,” May writes, “I trust in their [missionaries’ and Khasis’] entitlement to beliefs, however foreign they are to me” (2). May tellingly references the significant influence of Greg Dening, his former colleague at Melbourne, on this work and its employment of an ethnographic imagination. And like Dening, May writes stylishly, imaginatively, and eloquently. May eschews a simple chronology, preferring instead to structure this work around a series of interlocking voyages, with flashbacks and intriguing digressions interspersed throughout.

With a careful eye for the local, the specific, and the quotidian, May builds up a rich ethnographic appreciation of the world created and inhabited by the missionaries. But it is a world populated by more than them and their followers, and May examines how they in turn interacted with other agents and manifestations of imperialism, including soldiers, merchants, planters, and civil functionaries, all of whom were pursuing agendas that were deeply entangled and frequently in collision. The lushness of the area fascinated the British, leading a number of them, in May's words, to “botanise across the hills” (103). Others, caught up in the conviction that the Indian plains would become Britain's cemetery, sought out places where sanitaria could be set up. Frictions ensued within the British expatriate community, and in the case of Jones, his leadership of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society was dramatically severed by scandals involving his marriage to the young daughter of a recently widowed Englishwoman, some questionable commercial dealings, and his defiance of his erstwhile employers. While Jones's time in the Khasi Hills was cut short, first by having to go into hiding to escape his employer, and then shortly after by death from disease in 1849, he along with other missionaries from Wales had established what was to become one of the most successful missionary enterprises in India.

That a quarter million people would converge at Shillong in 1991 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Jones's arrival in the Khasi Hills shows just how profoundly his eight years of activity had shaped the region. Empire of the Clouds not only offers a thoughtful exploration of the mission's early history, but does so by placing the mission simultaneously within the micropolitics of a recently established colonial outpost as well as the wider cultural and political currents of a global power. This is no mean feat, and we should all be grateful that Manchester University Press has wisely made this fascinating work much more widely available by releasing a paperback edition in 2016. I was once told by an editor that the mark of a good review was balance, namely, to offset praise by finding either a fault or taking issue with a position. I conclude this essay by doing neither. What I can say, though, is that I was left wanting someone to provide as sensitive and supple a treatment of the converts as May has done here for the missionaries.