RobertTobin: Privilege and Prophecy: Social Activism in the <scp>Post‐War</scp> Episcopal Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022; pp. xiv + 372.

no clear sense offered of the development in English racialist thinking over time.Also striking is the relative lack of discussion about the indigenous peoples of the Americas who were dispossessed, degraded, and decimated by English colonists.The focus of the book is overwhelmingly on the English colonists' mistreatment of the Africans in their power.Coles is very honest and graphic in outlining the savagery of the English in the Americas in "privileging chromatic categories … [that] allowed slaveholders to multiply their slave populations through a program of rape, and to profit by it" (p.139).There is no contradicting her exposé of the horrors of slavery in the English colonies.Her motive for writing of this book reflects the fact that the shadows cast by the terrible happenings of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries affect the American psyche even now.This book is not the definitive study of the roots of English racial thinking in the early modern era.It does not establish beyond debate that English thinking about race was shaped by the marrying of Galenic conceptions of the four humours with Calvinism, though it does establish a prima facie case that they may have been influential.It does not establish that Calvinists were more prone to racism than Catholics: all Christians regarded the Jewish Tanakh or Old Testament as authoritative, and it claims divine sanction for enslaving women and children (Deut., 20:14), for rape (Deut., 221:10-14; Numbers, 31:13-18) and for genocide against people whom God does not favour (Numbers, 31:13-18).It does not establish that the English were more prone towards racism than other peoples.In fact, a comparison of English theories and practices regarding the treatment of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa as against those of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch and others, would be helpful for determining what elements of English racialist thinking were unique and which were shared by other Europeans.One wonders too about the thinking of those Africans who enslaved their own people and sold them as slaves to Europeans.The analysis of English texts only can tell part of the wider story that has yet to be told about the relationship between early modern science, religion and race.Nonetheless, Coles' book is an important contribution to the on-going discussions about racialisation in the Anglophone world, though it should be emphasised that the subject was not a peculiarly English, nor indeed a peculiarly European, phenomenon.

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