Jeffrey Cox's recent overview of The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 casually suggested a new agenda for the burgeoning field of Christian missionary history. In noting the enormous, largely unheralded contribution of non-Europeans to global British evangelization efforts in the nineteenth century, Cox challenged scholars to seek out the great, invisible mission undertaken over the centuries by people of color. Not surprisingly, Edward E. Andrews's new monograph, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, invokes Cox's observation on its third page.

As Andrews points out, numerous historians of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century missions affirm the indispensability of non-European evangelists, but the place of the latter in the early modern period has only recently attracted comparable consideration. Native Apostles thus advances an interpretation of the early modern Atlantic world, which places the collaboration of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans at the heart of its Christianization.

In its introduction, Natives Apostles establishes the desirability of employing non-Europeans in furtherance of the gospel. Europeans were attracted to natives' linguistic skills as well as their imbrication within extant kinship and political networks, their acclimatization to the natural environments, and their cost effectiveness compared with imported missionaries. After this, however, the book is largely anecdotal, moving across the vast spaces of the early modern Atlantic: Great Britain, America, Africa, and the Carribbean—following the networks of correspondence, education, and funding back and forth across the ocean.

Somewhat surprisingly, the various moments considered are rarely unfamiliar to the early modernist: the praying towns of New England; the missionary endeavors associated with Thomas Bray and the Anglican revival; George Berkeley's Bermuda scheme; Codrington College in Barbados; the Charleston Negro School; Philip Quaque's West African mission; Eleazar Wheelock's Moor's Charity School—all are well-studied efforts at black and native Christianization, though Andrews does render them with commendable detail and sympathy. His book is particularly adept at underscoring the often tragic circumstances of the native apostles caught between worlds, such as the murder of the Native American evangelist John Sassamon during King Philip's War or the London-educated Quaque's mounting alienation from both the African royalty and British imperial officialdom. Yet these poignant biographical details only reinforce the larger sense that what unites these various endeavors was not simply the interracial collaboration that Andrews considers their signal features. They were all, also, colossal failures. Indeed, the one successful effort under consideration in this volume was the Moravian “national helper system” employed in the mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean, which entrusted converted African slaves with the pastoral oversight of their bonded compatriots, claiming some eleven thousand converts in the British Atlantic by the close of the eighteenth century. Yet somehow this institution seems least germane to the volume's stated topic of indigenous missionaries.

In the absence of a strong historical argument, Andrews tends to drift from one effort to the next—perhaps driven by the relatively scarce primary sources, rather than the service of a well-articulated thesis. Chapter after chapter, we are reassured that the employment of Africans and natives was “vital” or “central” to Christianization efforts in the Atlantic world, and virtually each time we are treated to another debacle. The causes of failure are by no means consistent. Still, at no point does this overwhelming record of miscarriage elicit from the author a reconsideration of his insistence that native apostles were “vital components of the early modern Protestant missionary enterprise” (11).

But if effectiveness was not the key to their importance to the Protestant mission, then what was? Andrews never really says. Nor does he compare these efforts to the work of Protestant missionaries ministering to white communities (in, say, the notoriously irreligious East and West Indies), many of whom complained of similarly dismal track records with recalcitrant populations. Absent the framework of an overarching historical argument (or even a critical historiographical introduction) that might establish the criteria for assessing the importance of these efforts, the reader is left to surmise. It is never entirely clear whether Andrews's story points toward the autonomous nonwhite churches and spiritual communities of the early nineteenth century (which populate his conclusion) or toward the more functional interracial missionary collaborations of the later nineteenth century (highlighted in the introduction). At the very least, the author should inform the reader precisely why the century preceding the American Revolution was so unpropitious for either of these developments.

Andrews is often content simply to quarrel with the notion that native and African American adoption of Christianity was a “passive subjugation to imperial and colonial authority” (6). Indeed, throughout Native Apostles, the author is at great pains to highlight what we might (after James C. Scott) call the “infrapolitical” resources provided by Christianity for social aggrandizement, anti-imperial resistance, and the interpretation and articulation of individual and collective suffering. But this intervention is not without problems. First, given the well-known difficulty of evangelizing both Africans and Native Americans in this period (rehearsed once again in this volume), it is not clear why this process would ever be characterized as a “passive subjugation” or upon what grounds. Second, the infrapolitical dimension is often simply unfalsifiable. If both rejection and acceptance of European Christianity constituted forms of anti-imperial resistance, then it is incumbent upon the historian to suggest why one tactic was chosen over the other at any given moment. The recovery of agency can only be a prelude to the explication of an actual agenda.

Native Apostles contains a wealth of information about the collaborations of Europeans and non-Europeans in the attempted Christianization of the Atlantic world. But it remains uncertain about the historical significance of these all-too-human efforts. Did these serial failures affirm the prematurity of evangelization in the so-called first British Empire? Or did they, like the Christian narrative itself, anticipate a triumph to be realized only in the fullness of time?