The history of the Jesuit mission to late Imperial China has been the focus of intense historical inquiry. Some of the figures—Matteo Ricci, Adam Schall, Ferdinand Verbiest—exerted an influence far beyond religious history into the realms of science, politics, and culture. That legacy remained even when the Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, a heritage that the re-founded Society tried to capture when a handful of Jesuits returned to China in 1842 after the First Opium War. But this second Jesuit mission was by definition different since it resulted from Western imperialist aggression against Qing China, of which France, the country of the returned Jesuits, fully participated in during the Second Opium War of 1858–1860. Unlike the old Jesuit mission, this new one was dominated thus by one country, France, which in turn provided diplomatic (and by implication military) support for the Catholic enterprise. French Jesuits thus made up more than half of the fathers in the period under consideration. Other than the few Chinese fathers who assumed inferior positions and were distrusted and looked down on by their French brethren, the French dominated the scene until 1900, thanks to the protection declared over all Catholic missionaries proclaimed by successive French governments. Jesuits of other Western nations only arrived later in the game, with most entering a new republican China after 1911. For this reason—and due to the decentralized nature of the documentation of the different Jesuit missionary jurisdictions—the author, an Australian Jesuit with a passion for the missionary enterprise, has chosen to divide his narrative into two volumes, with the first and longer one devoted to the French Jesuit Mission (with its handful of Italians) and the other to the Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Austrian, Canadian, and American Jesuits.

The volumes are organized chronologically and the exposition follows the extant documentation closely. Annual reports and letters are summarized, at times paraphrased or cited at length. This internal history of the mission is contextualized with narratives of Chinese history for those unfamiliar with the historical context. Strong's concern is both to describe the achievements of the Jesuits and to document their experiences in China and their attitudes toward Chinese culture and the Chinese people. To that extent, he is scrupulously honest, quoting repeatedly the often-disparaging attitudes of foreign Jesuits, especially the French, toward China, her people, and culture, and even toward their fellow brethren within the Company. The irony, often remarked on by Strong, is the contrast between French chauvinism and the French fathers’ vehement disapproval of Chinese nationalism, rising in force after the 1911 Revolution, ascending in the Anti-Christian Movement of the early 1920s, and climaxing in the Communist Revolution of 1949–1950. Within Chinese Christianity, that nationalistic trend expressed itself in the desire for a Chinese Church that was directed by a Chinese clergy in order to purify this foreign religion from the stains of Western imperialist aggression. Despite the support of the Vatican in the early twentieth century and especially the personal effort of Bishop Celso Costantini, the Apostolic Legate to China in the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of foreign Jesuits dragged their feet in passive resistance to the promotion of the Chinese clergy. During the Japanese invasion (1937–1945), a minority of Western Jesuits even preferred their rule to that of the Chinese, despite the heroic identification of Vincent Lebbe, a Belgian Lazarist who championed the Chinese cause and became a Chinese citizen. The denouement came after 1949. Western Jesuits, together with a large part of the nascent Chinese episcopacy, strongly opposed the communist regime. By 1954, all foreign missionaries----Catholic and Protestant---had been expelled from China; a few were jailed; and some Chinese clergy paid for their faith and opposition with long years of imprisonment.

Fifteen years in the making, A Call to Mission is an impressive work of research. Strong visited archives in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Canada, the USA, and Taiwan to read his documents. For the sake of comprehensiveness, he has used translators for languages he does not know; and he has a strong grasp of the secondary scholarship of the field. Particularly successful is the first volume, where Strong describes the work of the French Jesuit Mission. Laudable in giving voices to Chinese Jesuits—notably Ma Xiangbo and Jin Luxian—Strong attempts to situate his story firmly in the context of modern Chinese history. There is a great deal of use to scholars: short biographies, statistics, diocesan data, and others. Many local reports from missionaries shed new light on the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the Japanese invasion. All in all, this is a valuable work of scholarship.

Nevertheless, the book is not without major flaws. Organized around documents from different archives, Strong has decided to tell his story from the perspective of different ecclesiastical jurisdictions. While this works for the first volume on the French Jesuit mission, which had a continuous presence between 1842 and 1954, it works less well for volume 2. Not only were the other Jesuit missions of shorter duration and significance, Strong also has to repeat contextual information and themes that makes reading tedious. Having followed the rise and achievements of the Jesuits in Shanghai in their complex at Xujiahui and their ultimate demise, the second volume comes as an anticlimax and reads like an extensive notebook on documents studied in half a dozen archives. The scholarly apparatus is also wanting. Chinese names are given in their French Romanization, in Wade-Giles, and in pinyin, although the author tries to have a unified approach to place names. Although some recent scholarship, notably PhD dissertations on the modern Jesuit Mission to China (Huang Xiaojun at Princeton and Hsin-fang Wu at Penn State) have not been consulted, Strong makes a good faith effort to represent the Chinese perspective. All the more surprising that an individual like Jin Luxian, a Chinese Jesuit educated at Xujiahui and in France, at loggerheads with his superiors in Shanghai, and subsequently a leader in the Patriotic Catholic Church in the PRC, whose memoirs are quoted at length, is altogether missing in the Index. Despite these flaws, A Call to Mission is an indispensable reference for anyone who engages with the study of Catholicism in modern China, thanks to the author's comprehensive and prodigious study of Jesuit archives.