Evangelicals have always been excellent networkers, building a web of global relationships and influence to further their gospel causes. In this important monograph, Gareth Atkins demonstrates that the late-Hanoverian evangelicals in the Church of England, in the age of William Wilberforce, Hannah More and Charles Simeon, were perhaps the best networkers of all. As much as the Victorian hagiographers liked to claim that their fathers and mothers in the faith stood independent of worldly methods like patronage, and were often excluded from the establishment, Atkins demonstrates that the opposite was the case. Indeed, this volume could have been alternatively titled, Establishment Evangelicalism. These men and women were content to use all available means to advance their ambitions, and although they were at the forefront of innovation and entrepreneurship they also took ‘full advantage’ of older Hanoverian social and political structures. To a later reformist generation, patronage had the stench of nepotism and corruption, and therefore was erased from the pious record. But through voracious research in surviving private papers, Atkins reveals in a sequence of fascinating case studies the obsessive evangelical ‘pursuit of power’ and their desire to achieve nothing less than ‘institutional take-over’ (pp. 12-14). Evangelical networks were embedded throughout the corridors of power. In the City of London, they bound together financiers and merchants, in a world where mutual trust and raising credit were critical to success. ‘Guineas and godliness seemed almost interchangeable’ (p. 104), and businessmen and marketeers joined forces to help evangelical philanthropic and missionary enterprises reach their global potential. In the Colonial Office, evangelicals also exercised ‘significant clout’ (p. 167), exploiting their connections to extend their control over appointments throughout the British Empire. A similar strategy was apparent in the East India Company and the Royal Navy, where they were ‘consummate insiders’ (p. 179), leveraging their patronage networks and their family trees to great advantage. Atkins persuasively illustrates this ‘symbiosis’ (p. 223) between evangelicalism and the establishment, with wonderfully fresh detail and incisive commentary. The old picture of Hanoverian evangelicals as embattled and reactionary critics is decisively dismantled. These godly manipulators in fact held ‘disproportionate influence’ (p. 246) over establishment institutions, controlling the tone of public discourse even while they forged wider political coalitions to promote their agendas. Atkins goes further and challenges the Victorian nostalgia – which still shapes the currently scholarly literature – for a Hanoverian golden age when evangelical giants walked the land. For 150 years, standard historical periodizations have posited a sharp break around 1833, the year that Wilberforce died and the Tracts for the Times were born. The 1820s or 1830s are often seen as signalling the decline of the Clapham Sect (itself a misleading construct), and the eclipse of Georgian moderation by aggressive and apocalyptic Victorian extremism. Yet Atkins helpfully problematizes these common assumptions, emphasizing the continuity between the Hanoverian evangelicals and their successors. It is a carefully nuanced, insightful study, with delightful prose and minute observation, which should change the way in which Anglican evangelical history is henceforth written.