Thanks to the comic novels of George MacDonald Fraser, we know the fate of Flashman, the bullying cad of Tom Brown's School Days: he joins the army to seek fame and fortune overseas. Thanks to the book under review, we now know more about the milieu of at least one of the other protagonists: Hughes's magisterial footer captain ‘Old Brooke’ was almost certainly modelled on John Gell, who also went abroad, albeit as a strapping clergyman and schoolmaster who exported rugby and Arnoldian education to Van Diemen's Land. While missions to the ‘heathen’ have long preoccupied historians of British global expansion, this book focuses instead on the settler colonies. The subject is not a new one: Rowan Strong, Hilary Carey and Alex Bremner have all marked this out as a rich field. Hardwick's contribution is to emphasise the importance of boots on the ground, arguing, like Michael Gladwin's Anglican clergy in Australia (2015), that the nascent Anglican Communion was forged less through institutions at home than through individuals in situ. The withdrawal of state privileges was traumatic, but it was also creative, forcing churchmen to find alternative ways of financing and organising their activities. This premise is pursued through chapters on recruitment; the colonial laity; the Colonial Bishoprics' Fund; domestic support; networks; and the fraternities that reinforced distinctive ethnic subidentities within Anglicanism, such as St George's societies and the Orange Order. Hardwick's main theme is adaptation to new realities. Anglicans were surprisingly good at it. While their opponents railed against ‘effete and worthless spiritual despotism’, clergymen constantly sought to reach out towards independent-minded and sometimes sceptical populations, often by ceding power to them (p. 125). Yet the innovation that characterised this world was idealistic as well as pragmatic. Like their contemporaries who envisioned ideal societies overseas, ecclesiastical strategists viewed the colonies as a petri-dish: Colonial Secretary Gladstone was pushing for independent churches with elected synods years before they were mooted in Britain (pp. 102–4). While recent work on imperial networks has tended to emphasise their autonomy, Hardwick rightly resists the temptation to overemphasise the decentredness of this particular sphere. Most careers began and ended at home: the ex-New South Wales clergyman Francis Vidal, for instance, continued to raise money for Australian church bells as a master at Eton (pp. 195–6). By focusing on settler colonies Hardwick sets sensible bounds to an otherwise unmanageably large topic. This does, however, make for some blind spots. Little is said about India, New Zealand or the Caribbean, or areas of informal control. This has knock-on effects for the colour of the churchmanship that we encounter. The High Church-dominated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel thus features heavily, whereas the largely Evangelical Church Missionary Society scarcely appears; Evangelicals are represented instead by the much more marginal Colonial Church Society. It also has implications for the book's chronological coverage: although much has now been written on eighteenth-century Anglicanism overseas, in beginning essentially with the loss of America in 1783 and the despatch of the First Fleet to Botany Bay in 1787, the impression given here is of a tabula rasa. Nevertheless, this book will occupy a deserved place in the growing historiography of global Anglicanism.