Larry Gragg's excellent new monograph is the first book-length study of West Indian Quakerism to appear since Harriet Durham's Caribbean Quakers (Hollywood, FL, 1972). Exhibiting exemplary command of archival and printed sources, it offers an interpretation of the movement's rise and fall on Barbados. Religious minorities contributed significantly to the early colonization of the Americas. Familiar examples include the Sephardic Jewish communities in Pernambuco and the West Indies, the Calvinist-led settlement of New England, the Huguenot diaspora within North America, and the success of Quakerism in founding Pennsylvania. Studies of seventeenth-century merchants (by Bosher, Brenner, and others) have also emphasized the role of nonconformist communities in developing the Atlantic trades and fostering a “Protestant international.” Yet, belief-oriented networks failed to sustain themselves in all areas of British Colonial America, and within the Caribbean there is a notable hiatus separating the early eighteenth-century decline of Quaker and Jewish minority communities and the later spread of Methodism, Baptism, and Moravianism. Consequently, this monograph is a welcome contribution to the historical literature of colonial religion that deepens knowledge of Barbadian social development and broadens understanding of the characteristics and significance of dissenting groups within the Atlantic world more generally. In The Quaker Community on Barbados, Gragg investigates three principal themes: first, explanations of the movement's initial popularity; second, conceptualization of Quakerism as a coherent “counterculture” (4–5), challenging the dominant planter group; and third, explanations of the sect's decline. In contrast to New England and Pennsylvania, Quakers in Barbados did not grow up as a migrant sect and instead depended on converting existing settlers. Itinerant missionaries, such as Henry Fell and George Fox, proved to be “critical players” (57) and were vital in spurring recruitment. Gragg argues their success was based on a simple, alluring message: “hope, an invitation to embrace the Light of Christ” (50). Barbados itself failed to provide autonomous leadership of the same caliber as these itinerants. Consequently, in order to maintain coherence the movement relied heavily on a disciplined internal structure of meetings (established by Fox and modeled on England) and a regular flow of visits, epistles, and printed pamphlets from Britain. Gragg demonstrates that the ranks of identifiable Quakers consisted primarily of landowners, merchants, and artisans of above-average wealth and their families, rather than the poorest elements of white settler society. The argument that a clearly articulated religious message of personal salvation bound Barbadians into a community of like-minded individuals is persuasive. Besse's recording of 657 instances of persecutions over a twenty-five-year period supports the view that the island's Quakers comprised disaffected persons who felt neglected or alienated by the colony's social hierarchy, political institutions, and established church. Whether the Society of Friends represented a counterculture on Barbados is more problematic. Undoubtedly, Quakers succeeded in creating what Bourdieu characterizes as “cultural capital”: a set of traits and behaviors distinct enough to differentiate themselves from other groups. In addition to fines and imprisonment (badges of honor or quasi martyrdom), Gragg emphasizes the separateness of Quaker society: the family orientation of Friends, their commitment to endogamous marriage, and the tendency to confine business dealings to members of the sect. It is a big step, however, from assembling evidence of a subculture's existence to concluding that Quakerism mounted a systematic challenge to planter culture. Significantly, opposition to slavery did not form part of group identity since Barbadian Quakers generally viewed Africans as different and morally inferior, dealt readily in the produce of slave labor, and were accepting of slave ownership and a continuation of the slave trade. While Gragg highlights a number of tracts questioning aspects of slavery, he concedes that there was no antislavery movement as such. The significance of seventeenth-century Quaker discourse, as Brycchan Carey has argued, lies rather in its contribution to a vocabulary of opposition to slavery that gathered force from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Gragg estimates that in 1680 there were approximately 1,200 Quakers in the colony, but by 1715 he suggests the total had fallen to fewer than 200, and by 1763 the movement was effectively extinguished. He concedes, however, that these figures are conjectural. The only certain conclusions that can be drawn are that membership peaked during the later seventeenth century (when Quakerism probably accounted for a greater proportion of white colonists than its share of English population) and that by the early 1760s, when the Society of Friends spearheaded the abolition campaign in Britain, only a handful of followers remained. Four arguments are advanced to explain the sect's demise: epidemic disease during the 1690s, emigration to Pennsylvania, growing conformism resulting in a loss of separate identity, and internal dissension within the community. Three further arguments might also be adduced: the near-simultaneous failure of other island Quaker groups (the text alludes to collapse in Nevis, Jamaica, Antigua, and Bermuda; 165), the long-term disadvantages of endogamy, and the small number of adherents even at the movement's peak. Failure beyond Barbados suggests external factors were influential: the attractions of Pennsylvania perhaps also combined with leadership failings in London. The negative consequences (e.g., in terms of capital accumulation) of confining trade and marriage opportunities to a closed network, however, ought not to be discounted. Ultimately, Quakerism failed on Barbados because the movement proved unable to recruit new members faster than it lost Friends to death, out-migration, or defection. It may simply be the case that a community of 1,200 souls was too small to be viable in the face of the challenges and setbacks the movement inevitably encountered.