This volume effectively summarises the insights of a highly productive decade in the field of transatlantic religious history, while also suggesting that a bounty remains to be harvested. Breaking from past generations of scholarship, America is no longer just New England, as reflected by George Harinck's study of the role of the Dutch diaspora in the Midwest for the transmission of neo-Calvinism. Canonical transatlantic personalities such as George Bancroft and Philip Schaff are present in this volume, but they are joined by lesser known figures such as Edward Robinson and Nicolaus Steffens.

A key strength of this book is its attentiveness to institutions that facilitated transatlantic exchange. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in Andrew Kloes's essay on how the establishment of religious periodicals in the late eighteenth century enabled nineteenth-century Christians on both sides of the Atlantic to ‘imagine the existence of an invisible church, whose members were scattered throughout the world among many different ethnic groups and Protestant traditions’ (p. 40). Ecumenism, Kloes argues, was downstream of religious journalism. Yet, one critical institution overlooked in the book is the Evangelical Alliance. By bringing together Protestant leaders from Britain, America and continental Europe, the Evangelical Alliance's inaugural meeting in London in 1846 was the most important institutional embodiment of the ‘transconfessional and transnational Christian identity’ that extended beyond ‘Anglo-Atlantic or German-American associations’ (p. 7). Given its founding aim of combating religious infidelity, the Evangelical Alliance also demonstrated Hartmut Lehmann's closing insight in the book's epilogue: that Christians on both sides of the Atlantic fretted over the perceived secularisation of their societies. Despite these acknowledged fears, this volume convincingly shows that to a significant extent nineteenth-century people encountered the world beyond their immediate communities through religious networks.

Transatlantic scholarship often amounts to just the study of unidirectional European influence on the Americas, which characterises many of the chapters in this volume. The book contains, however, several important exceptions that show how intellectual influence in the long nineteenth century was bidirectional. These chapters tended to focus on Catholics. Charlotte Hansen considers how a visit to the United States and interaction with leading American Catholics were formative for the English Catholic intellectual Lord Acton. Timothy Verhoeven demonstrates that the example of American religious disestablishment was important during the debate on France's 1905 law separating Church and State. In tearing down the stereotype of ‘freedom of religion in the United States, freedom from religion in France’ (p. 239), Verhoeven's work indicates interesting vistas for future research. Did any French republicans envision a Gallic version of the Christian-Enlightenment synthesis articulated by American historians of religion such as Mark Noll? Did French Catholics contrast the positive example of American disestablishment with the negative example of Bismarck's Kulturkampf? Possibilities abound, illustrating that this volume suggests continued fruitfulness for scholars of its subject.