Hilary M. Carey. God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801-1908. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Tables. xxiii + 421 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-19410-5.

Reviewed by David Lindenfeld (Louisiana State University)

In this study, Hilary M. Carey sheds light on a relatively neglected aspect of missionary activity in the British Empire, namely, as directed to those who settled in the colonies rather than to the colonized–“an attempt to prevent the heathenizing of Christians” rather than “Christianizing the heathen,” as one enthusiastic advocate put it (p. 180). Thus the distinction between “colonial” and “foreign” missions runs through the book. Carey notes that the original meaning of “mission” (from the Latin “I send”) was to establish church structures in new geographical territories, and only incidentally to convert non-Christians. The lack of attention to the former in recent historiography, however, is not merely due to fashionable postcolonialism; the interest in converting the heathen increased steadily in British popular consciousness during the nineteenth century itself. Yet, as Carey points out, colonial settlers were far from a negligible quantity: the populations of the British in both Australia and Canada exceeded those in Scotland and Ireland by the 1920s, and most of these claimed allegiance to some Christian denomination. Carey’s work thus reinforces that of the New Zealand historian James Belich, whose 2009 study points to a “settler revolution” by English-speaking peoples. In New Zealand, for example, settlers saw their new homeland not merely a part of “greater Britain,” but as a “better Britain,” free of the class divisions that plagued the mother country