Carla Gardina Pestana's most recent monograph centers on how spiritual concerns gave shape to an expanding Protestant Empire, from the three kingdoms to the dozens of British Atlantic settlements in the Caribbean, North American mainland, and West Africa. This wide-ranging synthesis, aimed at the general reader as well as students and scholars, delves into religion's impact on society, politics, and individual experience from early English expansion through abolition. Diversity is the keyword for this study, as Pestana parses the effects of Britain's religious fragmentation through subtle and dramatic changes in colonial and metropolitan worlds.

The book is organized along traditional chronological lines, bringing subjects from her ample geographic scope into conversation with one another. As with any broad synthesis, scholars will find some chapters more convincing than others. Pestana opens with “Religion before English Expansion,” outlining in broad strokes how life turned around a spiritual axis in Europe, Africa, and the Americas in an effort to mitigate the Eurocentric tendency to separate religious traditions into Christianity/monotheism versus animism/polytheism. Instead, she presents early modern spiritual forces through a lens of commonality: shared beliefs in human access to malevolent spiritual forces (witchcraft), recourse to spiritual intercessors (whether saints, ancestors, or subordinate deities), and the force of ritual to cement social and communal norms. She follows with a summary of how Europe's sixteenth-century schism brought a politicized urgency to England's competition with rival Spain for overseas riches and access to the souls of America's “heathens.” The attention paid in this chapter to the gradual and uneven progress of Protestantism in England, Scotland, and Wales, and the persistence of Catholicism in Ireland, provides a firm background for understanding the battles over religious conformity discussed in chapter 3. In this sprawling chapter, Pestana tracks the ways that diversity of religious opinion grew stronger throughout the British world, breaking the early Stuarts’ struggle for absolute religious uniformity; she also attempts to tie what she sees as the era's general “puritanization” (87) to a surge in missionizing on both sides of the British Atlantic (to Native Americans and Gaelic-speaking Scots), though this argument seems underdeveloped. Next, Pestana outlines the pluralism that emerged as a defining feature of Britain's Atlantic landscape after the Restoration, from Native American traditionalisms to the wide variety of transplanted belief systems, from West African syncretism to Quaker pacifism, as well as the arrival of Seventh-Day Baptists, German pietists, and French Huguenots. In this world, the Church of England battled against a rising tide of practical toleration for Protestant dissenters. In chapter 5, Pestana forms a suggestive parallel between the Indian wars of 1675–76 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 to argue for the roots of the period's religious polarization: American colonists interpreted Indian wars through the idiom of providentialism, strengthening antagonisms between “Christian” and “heathen”; meanwhile, British subjects of many religious persuasions united against the “popery” of James II, ushering in an era of toleration for various Protestant denominations by means of Catholic exclusion. With cooperation and toleration providing the primary tone for the reign of Protestant William and Mary, Britain took on new strength as a beacon of Protestantism in Europe and the Americas. Pestana shows how Church of England missionary efforts to the unchurched in areas like Scotland, Wales, and the Americas—and for the first time a concerted plan to convert Africans—largely failed to strengthen the state church, while the rise of mysticism and rationalism created new clashes. In chapter 7, Pestana explores the religious revivals of the eighteenth century, looking at Great Awakening evangelical churches alongside Native American efforts to revitalize “nativist” traditions. Her final chapter explores the religious consequences of the Atlantic revolutions that spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here the Atlantic focus works especially well, as Pestana compares the stakes for religious establishments within Britain's (now worldwide) empire and the fledgling United States. From revolution to the second Great Awakening, political conflict again took on millennial overtones, while evangelical efforts among the enslaved made Christian symbolism a salient force to challenge their oppression. Pestana's range in this chapter reflects her eclectic, all-embracing range, covering issues such as the pitfalls of religious assimilation for the Cherokee, the growth of separatist black churches in Nova Scotia, and missionary settlement in Sierra Leone. The author consistently takes on both bottom-up and imperial perspectives (a Herculean task given the geographic scope), though she is most persuasive when representing the subtle interactions between various British actors.

Beyond the thought-provoking content, a most puzzling editorial move was to severely cut the number of notes included in the text—although dense with description, it was rare for any chapter to refer to more than twenty bare-bones citations. The logic seems to have been that citations were provided only in the case of direct quotes (used sparingly) and occasionally to note a particular scholarly intervention. The dearth of endnotes is especially unfortunate since Pestana has a subdued authorial voice, making it difficult to distinguish where her summary of the secondary literature ends and fresh insights gleaned from her bird's-eye view of splintered historiographies begin. I found myself frequently wanting to follow up on readings in fields where I sensed a provocative new interpretation, but was consistently frustrated in my attempts to explore and interrogate those points. While Pestana's introduction “encourage[s] readers to look into specific incidents or groups in more detail” (11), the eight-page essay providing “Suggestions for Further Reading” seems to only scratch the surface. Organized along geographic and denominational lines, this bibliography obscures the change-over-time framing of the book's narrative. Surely much of this comes from an attempt to make the text more reader-friendly, but more thorough citation would have given the book more versatility—even if pitched as a cross-over textbook, a one-page readings list at the end of each chapter would better allow students (and their curious professors) to explore independently the amazing complexity of religious, social, and political forces with which Pestana engages.