During the two and a half centuries of the East India Company, 665 men served as chaplains to the company. The vast majority were priests of the Church of England, primarily English; a small but significant number were Scots, either in episcopal orders, or, after 1813, ministers of the Church of Scotland, when the Company set up a parallel Presbyterian establishment. With the exception of a focus on the Evangelical Company chaplains of the 1790s and early 1800s, scholars have tended to dismiss the mission work of the Company as feeble and ill thought out (reflecting, in fact, the Evangelical critique). It is not O'Connor's purpose to offer an apologia for company chaplains. But he sees their work as important in the development of British missionary activity, and of the creation of a worldwide Anglican communion. The book is a short survey, based on the extensive Company archives in the Oriental and Indian Collection of the British Library, which have not previously been used in a systematic way specifically to examine the role of chaplains. The book is organized chronologically, but with a thematic focus for each period, exploring the changing role of chaplains as the Company itself developed from a simple trading company to a military and administrative megalith. The first chaplains were primarily responsible for the spiritual and moral welfare of the Company's sailors. But from the mid-seventeenth century, chaplains were attached to the factories established at various coastal locations in East and South Asia, of which Bantam, in Java, and Surat, on the west coast of India, were particularly important. By the late seventeenth century, the establishment of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta as important urban centres for the Company, brought a further change in the scope of chaplaincy, taking on a pastoral role towards the European and ‘Eurasian’ Christian communities which had grown around the British forts. By the end of the eighteenth century, as the Company interfered more directly in Indian political affairs, and India itself became the arena of European colonial rivalries, chaplains took on a military role, being attached to regiments and cantonments. Five chaplains (and members of their families) died during the uprising of 1857, which brought an end to company rule.

Chaplains came from the whole spectrum of theological opinion in the Church of England – there were quite a few Puritans in the seventeenth century; in the nineteenth century many were Tractarian. Evangelical chaplains played an important role in criticizing the lack of missionary zeal in the Company at the end of the eighteenth century, causing controversy by their abrasive manner, and their lack of sensitivity to Indian religious sensibilities at the time, an ongoing debate in mission historiography. One of the important themes of the book is to show how the Company and its chaplains reacted positively to the Danish-German Pietist missionary work in Tranquebar, and encouraged the Lutherans to establish an ‘English mission’ among Tamil and Telegu who resided in Company territory. O'Connor argues that this is ‘a persuasive answer to persisting notions both of eighteenth-century Anglican torpor and of the Company's hostility to mission’ (p. 94). The chaplains also had concern for the spiritual life and well-being of the expanding mixed-race community which grew up around Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, in the creation of schools and orphanages. O'Connor is warmly appreciative of the evangelical chaplain Henry Martyn, particularly his translation skills, but less attracted to ‘the vehement bigotry which [Claudius] Buchanan brought the debate’ and ‘contempt for everything Indian’ (p. 146). Such a thesis clearly needs more critical analysis than is possible in this survey. O'Connor is warmly appreciative of the early bishops of Calcutta, both Middleton, a high churchman, and Daniel Wilson, an evangelical. They worked hard to establish a coherent church in India, to include Company chaplains and missionaries, at a time when ‘CMS [was] at its most bishop-resistant and SPG at its most tractarian’ (p. 141).

It was quite a coup to get Gordon Brown to write a preface to the book. The former Prime Minister notes that the ‘question of religious values and ethics in economic affairs’ has been an important one since the days of Adam Smith, ‘an acute observer of the East India Company's activities’. The overall impact of reading this fascinating account is that, despite the early determinations of the Company's directors to run their enterprise in thoroughly Christian ways, the chaplains were rarely in a position radically to influence its ethical conduct, especially during the financial plunder of the late eighteenth century, and the military expansionism of the nineteenth.

Daniel O'Connor has done mission and Indian scholars a service in pointing out the importance of the rich source of material in the Company archives. He hopes that it might encourage more detailed monographs and a more comprehensive history. The present work is an admirable overview and should achieve that aim. I wish that a more detailed historiographical appraisal of the material on chaplains in the archive had been included, and that there had been more detailed referencing. The original spark for this study was the unpublished comprehensive list of the chaplains which S.J. MacNally compiled between 1935 and 1976. Clearly that labour of love could not simply be reprinted in this work; but it would have been very valuable to have had a summary in an appendix, with the names, length of service and location of each chaplain. Probably that is no longer economically viable in today's publishing world.