One of the most striking developments in the academic study of Protestant Christianity in the last two decades has been the attention paid to the modern missionary movement overseas. This has been intimately entwined with the widespread examination of the role of culture, especially religious culture, in the processes of post-Enlightenment empire-building. One important sign of this has been the establishment of the series Studies in the History of Christian Missions under the general editorship of Brian Stanley and Robert Frykenberg. The essential features of the series are two. There is a laudable determination to avoid the too often uncritical, narrowly based and historically deficient writing of missionary history, and a commitment to take issue with the often no less partisan and resolutely secular analyses by historians convinced of the almost entirely marginal place of missions in the context of transatlantic, transnational and global imperialisms. Stanley's substantial volume, the latest in the series, naturally shares these goals. In focusing on the Edinburgh conference he takes the grandest of a series of international missionary conferences held since the 1860s, and gives it the serious treatment that it deserves. Earlier comment on the 1910 gathering has normally done little but rely on the conference's published history and records, including the reports of its eight panels or commissions which provided the material for discussion. Stanley recognises the significance of the conference as an occasion for assessing the results of the nineteenth century's missionary enterprise, its value for defining the varied contexts in which the movement was now placed, and its importance for setting the future missionary agenda. The range of his research is commensurate with such an ambitious outlook. It draws him to archives in the USA, Geneva and throughout the UK, and indicates the extent to which missionaries were globalisers before their secular counterparts. It examines the significance of theological understanding, as well as the conceptual importance of ‘race’, ‘civilisation’ and the remnants of previous orthodoxies in the form of the ‘three selves’, for missionary understanding of their own past a well as their future planning. There is a mass of material here on missionary approaches to education, the development of Protestant ecumenicalism and those who were to be its leaders until the Second World War, the virtual absence of non-white delegates, attitudes to other world faiths, and the conflicts of denominations both at home and overseas. This is a first-rate study, and will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the interconnection of religion and empire in the century 1850–1950.