As Hilary Carey observes in her introduction to this valuable, multi-authored volume, the religious history of the British empire is a comparatively new field, and one that is proving highly contentious. There are, she notes, major debates over the relationship between the missionary movement and imperial expansion, over the role of religion in shaping a British imperial identity, over the British empire as a religious and cultural construction, and over the impact of gender, race, class and sectarianism in defining imperial attitudes. This collection of essays explores aspects of the contested religious history of the British empire between the later sixteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. The different authors consider the extent to which religion, and more particularly Christianity, shaped and defined imperial attitudes and imperial expansion, and also the extent to which religious discourse, in Britain and in the colonies, was shaped and defined by the interactions of the diverse peoples making up the empire.

The essays began as contributions to a conference held in June 2006 in Dublin. The volume editor is Professor of History at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and a highly respected scholar of the religious history of the British empire. While Christian missionary movements form a significant part of the book, this is not primarily a contribution to the growing field of mission history. Nor do the contributions in the book focus on Anglicanism, although Anglicanism arguably formed the main religious expression of the British empire. Anglican attitudes and missions, to be sure, are central to a number of the chapters, but the volume avoids an Anglo-centric approach. There is considerable coverage of Irish Catholicism, English Dissent and Scottish Presbyterianism; indeed, one of the book’s major achievements is to highlight the religious diversity of the British and Irish ‘metropole’, and the ways in which this diversity affected the imperial religious history.

The chapters are organized around three main themes — ‘religious metropoles’, ‘colonies and mission fields’ and ‘post-colonial transformations’ — which roughly reflect the chronological development of imperial religion from its origins in the North Atlantic archipelago, its expansion through both colonial settlement and missionary movements, and finally the conflicts and changes that came with the decline of empire, the emergence of new states, and the post-colonial interactions among former peoples of the empire. There are a number of exceptional contributions. John Wolffe provides a thoroughly researched account of the short-lived Imperial Protestant Federation of 1898, and the efforts of some colonial settlers to define imperial unity around a strident anti-Catholicism. Esther Breitenbach demonstrates the vital role of the missionary movement in shaping Scottish public support for empire, and the way in which the missionary movement could provide opportunities for women as educators and doctors. The Scottish missionary movement is explored in its African context by John Mackenzie, who focuses on the Scottish missionaries in the eastern Cape of Africa and their efforts to re-form African society around Scottish examples, whether in the management of agricultural estates or in popular education. Anne O’Brien considers the Anglican mission to the aboriginal people of the northern territories in Australia, contrasting the very different missionary careers and perspectives of the Anglo-Catholic bishop Gilbert White and the aboriginal mission worker, James Noble. In a somewhat whimsical chapter, Peter Clayworth considers the well-intentioned efforts of the Evangelical Anglican missionary, Richard Taylor, to respond to social Darwinist racism by arguing that all peoples shared a common ancestry, that the Maori of New Zealand were the descendants of Noah, and that the British colonization of New Zealand was part of the providential plan to reunite all Noah’s descendants.

Along with its commendable diversity and innovative approaches, the collection does have some weaknesses. While it would be unfair to expect that a single volume could provide comprehensive coverage of imperial religion, it is rather surprising that there is almost no mention of Islam. In his Guildhall Banquet speech of 1895, the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, famously observed that the British empire then included more Muslims than any state in the world, including the Ottoman empire, and that therefore the British imperial state could not ‘appear as the partisans of one religion against the other’. Yet none of the contributions in this volume explores the place of Islam within British imperial religious history. There is, moreover, a tendency in some chapters to denounce British historical actors from the perspective of more enlightened post-colonial attitudes, rather than seek to understand their actions and attitudes within the context of their times. One chapter, for example, provides a sustained denunciation of what it portrays as the ‘racialized discourse’ of the international child rescue movement of 1850–1915, while ignoring any positive achievements of the movement. Related to this, there is a tendency in some chapters to give little attention to the religious motivations of missionaries and care workers, including the readiness of many to sacrifice for their beliefs. This said, the collection represents an important contribution to the field of imperial religious history. It challenges traditional centre-periphery approaches and sounds the call for a multi-centred, multi-cultural approach that will do justice to the extraordinary historical experience that was the British empire.