Studies of the contribution of Nonconformist missions to the campaign for slave emancipation in the British Caribbean are relatively plentiful and well known. More scarce are treatments of the role of these missions in the period between emancipation in 1834 and the Morant Bay ‘Rebellion’ of 1865. This study by Cawley Bolt, a senior figure in the Jamaica Baptist Union, addresses this neglect and is therefore to be welcomed. Bolt has examined both periodical and manuscript sources in considerable depth and has written an account, principally focused on Jamaica, which fills many of the gaps of existing scholarship. Bolt's primary argument is that the missionaries were not racists, for they believed in the unlimited potential of the former slaves to reach the heights of civilisation with the aid of the regenerating power of the Spirit. This point will be familiar to those who know the scholarly literature on Protestant missions, but Bolt pushes it further. He argues convincingly that apparently racist pronouncements by the missionaries about the moral condition of the former slave population are to be understood as statements about the continuing debasing effect of slave society on black morals, and claims, reasonably enough, that such statements greatly undervalued the resilience of slave character. The missionaries, therefore, were ethnocentric cultural imperialists, but not racists. The next stage of the argument becomes more moralising and less persuasive. The paternalism of the missionaries is described as ‘poisonous’, ‘stifling and deadly’, to such an extent that it carried consequences ‘more invidious and pernicious than if they were outright racists' (p. 150), on the grounds that it postponed to the indefinite future the day when the former slaves might assume positions of independent church leadership. The apparent implication that straightforward racism would somehow have been morally preferable to paternalism is surely not what Bolt intends to say, and is, in fact, consistently undermined by much of his own argument. He adduces plentiful evidence to show that the Baptist missionaries, at least, were regularly attacked for the level of confidence that they placed in blacks to assume pastoral leadership, and their preparedness to view even the ‘Native Baptists’, whose churches functioned independently of any mission connection, with a measure of favour. Bolt appears to be torn between the direction in which his archival research led him and a sense of political obligation to Caribbean black identity that prevents him from giving the missionaries too positive a school report. The other problems about this book are the result of poor, or even non-existent, editorial control. The chapters are not numbered. The text is prolix and would have been improved by shortening of the voluminous quotations. Errors in referencing abound. A quotation from W. J. Woodstock, a CMS missionary, about his schools' work in South India, is inserted in the narrative immediately following a discussion of the Baptist missionary J. M. Phillippo's views on why Jamaican blacks were not yet ready for autonomous leadership, and readers may not notice that the geographical location and denominational reference have suddenly been changed within the same paragraph. Such blemishes may prevent this book from receiving the scholarly attention that it deserves.