Protestant empires. Globalizing the Reformations. Edited by Ulinka Rublack. Pp. xii + 362 incl. 22 figs. Cambridge–New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. £75. 978 1 108 84161 0

Migration, space, materiality and emotion are shown to have constituted spiritual experiences that could expand or diminish religious power across local, cross-regional and transnational boundaries. [...]innovations in reading and writing, scholarship and memory, experimentation and translation, reflected and profoundly shaped Christian and non-Christian lives. Situating Dutch Calvinism in the context of empire, economic expansion and evangelism, Charles H. Parker measures the fluidity of Protestant engagement with Islam, suggesting that expectations of widespread Muslim conversion to Christianity in south-east Asia were dashed during the seventeenth century, giving way thereafter to increasingly sensitive interest in Islamic texts and theology as well as a robust campaign of scriptural translation. Emphasising the role of millenarian beliefs in galvanising Pietist evangelism in south-east India, Ulrike Gleixner describes a ‘Kingdom-of-God-economy’ (p. 273), in which European sponsorship of missionary work became a form of active participation in a global eschatological drama.