This densely-packed collection of essays grapples boldly with the historical development of concepts and institutions shaping ‘the globalisation of religious ideologies and identities’ in today's world. Its central argument is that the process of modernisation has involved not only a significant degree of secularisation and religious decline but also the parallel development of ‘a new phenomenon in world history’, ‘the religious international’, ‘reshaping our understanding of the place of religion in the modern world, and [showing] how communities of believers became communities of opinion’. Recognition of these developments is essential to a deeper appreciation of ‘the changing role of religion in international politics’. The authors’ analysis is interwoven with the general history of global civil society, the complex dynamics of this process involving the changing technologies of worldwide communication, the migration of populations, commercial and imperial expansion, and a growing identification with particular political causes, for example anti-slavery and humanitarianism, or the institutionalisation of political and ecclesiastical reforms. The book falls into three parts, the first focusing on the three ‘religions of the book’, Evangelical Protestantism (Clark and Ledger-Lomas), Judaism (Greene) and Islam (F. R. Robinson), with each shown as adopting an increasingly expansive outlook. These provide pointers to a wide range of individual case studies for analysis in parts ii and iii. In part ii they are brought together under the umbrella of of ‘religious internationals in transition’, and in part iii it is their continued fragmentation and limited powers that provides an organising principle. Essays by Bennison (Muslim internationalism), Tsur (Jewish diaspora), Dekel-Chen (Jewish internationalism c. 1880s–1980s), and Clarence-Smith (Islamic religious international, c. 1750s–1930s) give the volume a particular Middle Eastern weighting, but a number of contributions will undoubtedly also find their specialist readers: Dixon (Russsian Orthodoxy in nineteenth-century Palestine); Chau (Buddist religious activists in the era of empires); Kitromilides (south-eastern Europe); Kennedy ; Appleby (twentieth- and twenty-first-century Protestant and Catholic experience); and Jaffrelot/ Therwath on contemporary international Hinduism). As a whole those essays dealing with the mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic experience are perhaps the weakest. Certainly the Buddhist material fails to compensate for the absence of a more penetrating assessment of the Evangelical experience from Wesley to John Mott, the World Council of Churches, and the YMCA. Nevertheless, this is a well-conceived volume, of interest for its comparative slant, its ambition and wide frame of reference.