Bob Tennant has set out to provide an account of the operational ethos of the Church of England's Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge [SPCK], the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts [SPG], and the Church Missionary Society [CMS], using as evidence critical studies of sermons preached in association with annual meetings, and the records of the constitutional and administrative arrangements of the societies. He emphasises that sermons during this period were the core subject-matter of publishing and bookselling, and estimates that each copy of a sermon was read by ten people. He regards these sermons as the locus of theologies of missions, and suggests that bringing them together with the annual reports, with which they were usually printed, and the minutes of the societies' main committees, enables a discussion of the competing ‘missiologies' of the societies and illustrates the ways in which the sermons gathered public support for the societies and their overseas projects. Tennant also wishes to advance Andrew Porter's hopes of building a bridge across the historiographical gulf between histories of empire and histories of mission. He infers an ideological bias against the Church of England among ‘secular’ historians, in ignoring the activities of the SPG, which was by far the largest English mission agency, and the CMS in accounts of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, regarding mission as subordinate to empire. He suggests that the SPG sermons by the leading bishops of their day, and the SPCK annual sermons for the London Charity Schools, illustrate the bishops' encouragement of overseas missions in North America and the West Indies by the SPG, and in India by the SPCK. He points out that they confirm that no bishop supported slavery, and that Bishop Butler's 1739 SPG sermon established the Church of England's critique of slavery, based on his emphasis on ‘benevolence’ as the social cement of society, which continued in episcopal sermons into the 1840s. As early as1784 William Vincent, subsequently headmaster of Westminster School and dean of Westminster, preaching for the SPCK, advocated establishing a ‘native’ ministry in India. The SPCK and the SPG emerge as administratively well-run organisations, with a considerable capacity for raising funds and adjusting to changing circumstances, especially in the 1830s with the loss of government grants for overseas bishops and chaplains, and in 1855 the loss of about £30,000 a year from funds raised by Queen's letters. He finds the SPG to be anti-imperialist, but criticises the CMS's centralised control of missionaries’ lives, and its cultural imperialism. Tennant has helpfully mined new information from under-used resources in the missionary societies’ archives. However he has neglected the considerable amount of recent scholarly work on missions and the missionary societies, which has begun to bridge the historiographical gulf between imperial and mission history, including the most recent histories of the SPG (now the USPG) and the CMS, and Peter Williams's important monograph The ideal of the self-governing Church (Leiden 1990). The discussion might also have benefitted from more awareness of recent research about religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the British colonies.