"Sivasundaram tellingly illustrates the missionaries' complex discursive engagement with the Pacific and its mediation through intersecting ideas of religion, civilization, and science...Nature and the Godly Empire offers rich insights into missionary discourse and the metaphorical deployment of nature in an extra-Europe context."
-David Arnold, University of Warwick, Journal of Modern History

"This book explores the interconnections between science, evangelical missions, and empire during the first half of the nineteenth century....The book contributes to a growing body of scholarship challenging the notion that secularization constitutes the Big Story of science during the nineteenth century....The book will force historians to question sharp modern distinctions between science and religion, the spiritual and the material, evangelicalism and Enlightenment, colonies and metropis, tradition and modernity, if they want to understand missionary and indigenous cultures..."
--John Stenhouse, University of Otago, The International History Review

"...an ambitious, ingenious, erudite, and well-written attempt to explain the scientific role of Christian missions featuring the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in the southeast Pacific." -Neil Gunson, Journal of World History

‘Colonial knowledge has assumed an increasingly important position in scholarship on British empire building in the Pacific. Sujit Sivasundaram's Nature and the Godly Empire is a key contribution to this developing line of enquiry. This richly textured monograph examines the connections between scientific knowledge and practice and the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Polynesia. Sivasundaram convincingly argues that the understandings of the natural world that missionaries brought to the Pacific were central to the ideology of the mission." -The Historical Journal

‘Nature and Godly Empire is a very interesting study of one of the key motors of Victorian culture and society, and its best sections sparkle with original analysis. It is precise and informative – the section about the LMS museum in London and the society's collecting culture is terrific – and it makes an important contribution to scholarship in the field." -Victorian Studies

‘Sivasundaram's book is a mine of new or off-the-beaten track information... It would appear to be essential reading for the historian of Christian expansion...for the missiologist reflecting on the cross-cultural communication of the Gospel; and to be sure, for any student of British Christianity in the early nineteenth century." -Journal of Ecclesiastical History