One of the first Protestant services of worship held in the western hemisphere was staged under an awning in the rudimentary settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in May 1607. That small beginning reflected and promoted a linkage between ‘religion’ and ‘empire’ symbolised by the Anglican Church's receiving established status in Virginia. Established status was in turn revoked in a ‘revolution’ whose final act – disestablishment – unfolded in 1786. But not before more than five hundred ministers had served in Virginia and more than 250 churches had been built. The presumption of this book is that one can tell the story of ‘early Virginia’ by reference to the history and progress of its original Church. In two previous books James Bell has established himself as the master of meticulously accumulated detail on the activities of Anglicans, especially ministers, in Virginia. Now, as his title suggests, he sets out to paint the bigger picture. As one would expect from his previous published work on the same topics, Bell offers a fluent account of the emergence of church governance in Virginia and a detailed prosopography of the Anglican ministry (especially in the seventeenth century). The focus of the work is organisational and Anglocentric, defensible perhaps in a study of Empire but problematic in a work addressing ‘revolution’. At various points the text, while noting the absence of precedents for gathering an Anglican Church so far from England, seems nevertheless to assume that issues of organisation, supply, staffing and administration could have been resolved if coherently addressed. The heroes of Bell's piece are the Board of Trade and successive bishops of London who worked to achieve a whole-cloth transplantation of the fabric of English Anglicanism to American soil. The text as a whole sketches fairly effectively the close association between the Church of England and the British Empire in America after the Glorious Revolution. But Bell's analysis of those links, especially at the level of ideology, is nowhere near as insightful as that produced by Peter M. Doll in Revolution, religion, and national identity: imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795 (2002); a work not cited in Bell's select bibliography. Given that the Church was a key symbol of English cultural or imperial hegemony it would seem well nigh inevitable that a newly independent Virginia would have disestablished it. So it is striking that, even allowing for the ebb and flow of the revolutionary war, the legislature did not get around to disestablishment until 1786. In the prior decade, its inherently weak position by now apparent, the Church, even though it campaigned half-heartedly for a continuation of former privilege, suffered little at the hands of the revolutionaries. Addressing the question of why this was the case suggests a research agenda more likely to illuminate the history of ‘early Virginia’ than Bell's emphasis on the Church in Virginia.