Though the cliché still occasionally surfaces, that Herbert Spencer's name vanished into oblivion soon after his death, both the large amount of scholarship on his work and the local detail of this collection on his global impact shows otherwise. In parallel with studies of the spread of Darwinism, with all the variety of theories and ways of thought under that heading, we now have a comparative study of Spencerism, also in many varieties. The editor and contributors self-consciously, and rightly, distinguish ‘communication’ and ‘appropriation’, to draw attention to the means by which science reaches larger audiences in forms dependent on the material conditions of publication and distribution and the local purposes of translators, publicists and readers. Nathalie Richards's chapter on France is a model of articulate appreciation of this. Obviously, no one in the future should describe or judge Spencer's place historically without consulting this collection.

After the editor's introduction to the precedents and practice of this kind of global survey, there are twelve chapters, most of which are about Spencer in the context of a nation state – very importantly, for Spencer was primarily read in the second half of the nineteenth century where educated elites attempted massive modernization or consolidation of a progressive identity in states in some sense new, or so convulsed as to feel new. There are informative chapters on Russia, Japan, China, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, the Scandinavian countries and France. In addition, there is a chapter on ‘Spencer's Arabic Readers’, notably the grand mufti of Egypt, Muhammad ‘Abduh, and two chapters on the United States, not turning again to debate social Darwinism as a category, but, first, providing a brief statement (rather anomalous in the collection) of Spencer's importance to William James, Josiah Royce and John Dewey, and second, the editor's own chapter on John Fiske and E.L. Youmans as Spencer's most effective North American publicists and fixers. There is also a very useful afterword, in which Gowan Dawson and Gregory Radick pinpoint something that will strike every reader of the collection, and at first glance surprise many, the importance around the world of Spencer's little book Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (first published in 1860 in New York).

This, I think, is the key to understanding Spencer's impact. Spencer was an evolutionist, yes, and his name frequently partnered Darwin's, and his name became, seemingly indelibly, associated with the slippery term ‘social Darwinism’. What motivated many to read him, and more especially motivated those who wished to publicize his work, was not especially an interest in biological evolution, let alone selection as its supposed mechanism, but rather a concern for social progress. His promoters were overwhelmingly reformers, who, turning to education as the means, sought social change. For them, Spencer was the philosopher of progress (rather than the philosopher of biological evolution), and the essays on education laid out the means in terms everyone could grasp. When Spencer's other work was translated, it was because it supported, and particularly added social data to, the demand for national progress. Hence another feature pinpointed in a number of the essays: the contemporary identification of Spencer as a positivist and the linking of his name with Comte's. Spencer did not like it, but the fact was that it was natural at the time, especially where politics involved struggle with a conservative religious institution as a major player, to run together Comte's and Spencer's vision of science, and science education, as the historical embodiment of progress. Spencer both gave the big picture and, in his little book, confirmed the means, and hence his place, whether in consolidating the opening of Japan to the West after the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate (in 1868), the period of slow liberalization in Mexico after the war with France (ending in 1861), or contributing to the ‘modern breakthrough’ in Sweden (1880s). This did not mean that all his supporters were liberals: ‘appropriation’ included conservatives in one direction and socialists (even Marxists) in the other, suggesting, once again, that Spencer's importance was not so much specific ideas (he complained regularly about being misrepresented) but the language for a discourse about society. Hence his global importance for the founding of social science. This is most strikingly expressed in G. Clinton Godart's chapter on Japan: there were no words for the categories of religion, philosophy, society or science in Japanese before the Meiji period. The appropriation of Spencer was thus the appropriation of the conceptual means, ‘society’, with which to formulate the very notion of a modern – that is, scientific – politics.

I have reviewed a few large points. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that there is much detail here (most basically, with lists of the translations of Spencer's work) in which scholars open up the world to us.