The message of this volume is in its title. Commissioned to write a history of a century of Christianity, the editors have decided to go emphatically global. World Christianities is a volume which has more pages on India than Ireland, and more consideration of the Thomas Christians than the Tractarians. The choice is, however, much more than a modish nod in the direction of globalisation: the editors have set out through their commissioning of chapters to demonstrate that over the course of the nineteenth century the centre of gravity of Christianity moved decisively beyond the confines of Europe. If Christianity in its different denominational variants was primarily the religion of Europeans in 1815, a century later the opposite appeared to be rapidly becoming the case. Everything, and more especially everywhere, is here, from the translation of the Bible into Tahitian (1835) to the Methodists of Canada. Or almost everywhere: in a decision the editors rightly deplore in their introduction as ‘wholly regrettable’ (p. 8), the guiding hands of The Cambridge History of Christianity have decreed that the Orthodox Church alone should be the subject of a separate volume in the series, and therefore the Orthodox lands of Greece, the Balkans and Russia remain a black hole in its supposedly global coverage.

The decision to go global does, of course, have its consequences. Most obviously, the space available to consider national histories is confined by the limits of what is possible within a single, albeit bulky, volume. Thus, France, Germany and Italy, for example, are all despatched in chapters of fewer than twenty pages each. The Netherlands and Switzerland are confined to half a chapter each, while poor little Belgium gets no space at all. Given the constraints of space, there is an obvious limit to what each contributor can do. Some chapters, such as that by James McMillan on France, are models of concision, while the one by Frank Coppa on Italy resolves the problem, a little brutally, by relegating the entire post-Risorgimento history of Catholicism to the final two pages of his survey of Italy. Of the European national surveys, only the chapter by Anthony Steinhoff on Germany stands out by virtue of its energetic presentation of the triumphal Protestantism of the post-1871 Reich.

It is not, however, only space which is at a premium. The decision to go global necessarily deprives the volume of a central thesis. To reduce to a single narrative the experiences of Churches in territories as diverse as Scandinavia, Indochina and Mexico would clearly be absurd, and the editors see their purpose as to present the sheer diversity of Christian experience. Such restraint does not, however, disguise sympathy and, on occasions, downright partisanship. If an overriding motivation has guided Gilley and Stanley in their editorial labours, it is undoubtedly the wish to slay once and for all the beast of secularisation. Almost wherever their contributors take them, they find more growth than decline, more advance than retreat, leading Gilley to the arresting conclusion at the end of his introduction that a century that had witnessed the challenges of liberal anticlericalism, atheist socialism and Darwinian evolution ‘was possibly a more successful period for Christianity than most’ (p. 9). If there are still readers out there who believe in a linear decline of religion in the face of modernity, they will emerge rather battered from their encounter with this volume. When, as one day will happen, CUP choose to make it available as an e-book, it will presumably be possible to search for the number of uses of the words ‘success’ and ‘failure’. I don't think the outcome, however, of that contest can be in doubt. The new religious history has encouraged us over the past thirty years or more to problematise the interconnection between religion and modernity; but the editors of this volume appear to wish to replace complexity with an optimistic tale of ecclesiastical initiatives, global missions and doctrinal innovations. This is most apparent in Gilley's own chapter on the papacy. No aspect of nineteenth-century Christianity is more remarkable than the emergence of the centralised and authoritarian (in every sense of the term) papacy. Yet, in a chapter that contains only four footnotes, Gilley contents himself with painting favourable character portraits of the popes of the era. Thus, we learn that Gregory xvi was an inveterate snuff taker (p. 15) and that Pius ix had a taste for mildly sacrilegious jokes (p. 17), but little about the mechanics of papal power (as explored most recently in the works of John Pollard, Vincent Viaene and others), before reaching the conclusion that four of the popes of the era (Pius vii, Pius ix, Leo xiii and his particular hero Pius x) ‘have claims to greatness’ (p. 29). It comes as something of a relief after a series of chapters in this vein to read finally in McMillan's chapter on France of people who stopped being Christian during the nineteenth century and for once of ‘the undoubted triumph of laïcité’ (p. 232).

It is this partisanship which infuses this volume with a rather old-fashioned air. For all of its global reach, World Christianities is a very Anglophone enterprise and is driven by concerns that, in the face of the remarkable outpouring of works of European and American scholarship on nineteenth-century religion, risk seeming a little parochial. Of the thirty-one chapters, all but five and a half are written from within the Anglophone world, and more than half of the chapters are written by scholars based in the United Kingdom. Some rise better than others to the challenge to think global. The chapters by Mary Heimann on Catholic revivalism and Andrew Sanders on Church architecture strive to generalise from their primarily English reference points; but the chapter on voluntary religion by David Bebbington makes no attempt to escape the British Isles apart from a single paragraph (pp. 64–5) which appears to imply that the formation of new churches on the European continent was primarily the product of British initiatives. Most disappointingly of all, the chapter by David M. Thompson on popular religion fails entirely to engage with the great weight of European scholarship on the subject and cites in its bibliography and footnotes only two non-English language works. We are all confined by the limits of our knowledge, linguistic and otherwise, but this British focus means that we are presented with a rather Anglophone and unconsciously imperial view of the world.

The scope of this volume therefore seems to be simultaneously too broad and too narrow. For all of its virtues of comprehensiveness and the individual qualities of many of the contributions, the work fails to provide a shape for the evolution of Christianity across the nineteenth century. The insistence that not all trends were downward is a valuable corrective to simplistic accounts of ‘the decline of religion’, but it can only be a starting-point for a more nuanced and problematic account of why the Christian Churches evolved in particular ways and why their fortunes varied so markedly in different locations. Stanley's conclusion strives to address this point, admitting that the cultural self-confidence displayed by the Christian Churches in the Edwardian period (sic) was built on ‘fragile foundations’ (p. 599). But, just as one hopes that the nature of that fragility might be explored, Stanley chooses to conclude by pointing, once again, to the spiritual revivals underway by 1914 in Ivory Coast and Gold Coast. The former, as he is right to imply, should not marginalise the latter; but nor can surges in Christian religiosity in the non-European world be allowed to occlude difficult questions about the changing nature and structure of Christianity in Europe and beyond. The reality of course is that there was no common pattern. As the Christian Churches became more global, so the similarities between them became more tenuous, or more exactly more Christian: it is after all a Christian assumption that anything more than common ritual united believers in Northamptonshire, Nyasaland and Nebraska. Very broadly speaking, the nineteenth-century Christian Churches operated in four environments: areas, notably most of Europe, of long-standing Christian dominance; regions, such as the Middle East and South Asia, of a long-standing Christian minority presence within multi-faith societies; emigrant cultures of new settlement, such as the white dominions and Latin and North America; and, finally, areas of imperial expansion, such as East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where Christianity was a new, and essentially missionary, presence. In each of these environments the explanations of (relative) success and failure were very different, as were the forms of Christianity that emerged. To explain those differences is the task which is left largely unanswered by this volume.