The Huguenot Global Diaspora Rebecca K. McCoy (bio) Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xii + 300 pp. Notes and index. $40.95. Owen Stanwood's examination of the Huguenot refuge follows the historiographical trend of placing events, once viewed mainly as European, in a global context. Many studies have examined the impact of the Huguenots in specific national contexts in Europe: Switzerland, the Netherlands, the German states, and England. Others have focused on the Huguenot diaspora in specific regions of overseas empires, including the American colonies and South Africa.1 Edited volumes have addressed the issue of integration by including nation- or colony-specific articles but offer little direct comparison.2 Another approach that does move beyond national borders has been analyses of Huguenot networks, such as financial, mercantile, or familial networks.3 Stanwood integrates these approaches into an account that emphasizes the connections among the Huguenots "on the edges of empire" as well as within Europe. Stanwood sets his research in the context of an age of overseas expansion and mercantilism, one in which religious tensions informed international rivalries. His argument compliments recent revisionist examinations of the Refuge by challenging the image created by the Huguenots themselves, one that portrays them as emigrating primarily for religious reasons.4 He argues that empire builders, particularly the Dutch and English, were, indeed, horrified by the persecution of fellow Protestants and saw the Huguenots as victims. But he also demonstrates that they viewed the French refugees as industrious workers who could people and develop their overseas empires, particularly by producing wine and silk. The Huguenots promoted themselves as God's chosen as shown by their resistance to intolerance, but were far from responding only to religious imperatives, because they needed powerful patrons to survive. Driven by pragmatism, they also styled themselves as people with special skills in order to attract patrons. Stanwood argues against the idea, promoted in later memory, that the Huguenots were simply martyrs for religious liberty. Instead, he suggests they had had multiple motives as they parlayed their international mercantile and family ties across the globe to survive in an age of empire. [End Page 257] Stanwood organizes his book thematically, escaping the national framework that has characterized much of the historiography on the Refuge. His thematic arrangement also proceeds roughly chronologically, capturing continuities and discontinuities over the period from 1685 to the revolutionary period. Chapter 1, "The Beginning of the End of the World," chronicles the immediate impact of the Revocation and the ways in which the Huguenots shaped their image from the outset. Stanwood uses the pastor Pierre Jurieu, to illustrate the intersection of the creation of an engaging story of the French Protestants, an appeal to Protestants to aid the refugees, and the mobilization of an international Protestant network, one that linked merchants, pastors, publications, and families.5 Jurieu, based in Rotterdam, immediately emphasized the religious reasons for leaving France. He emphasized their martyrdom in leaving all behind for the faith, characterizing those who stayed and abjured as less true to God. Those who left had a special status and were among the elect. This is the image that persisted until recent revisionist accounts began to show the complexity of the Huguenot experience in the Refuge. Jurieu, however, had the immediate practical goal of inspiring Protestants around Europe to aid the Huguenots by providing safe havens and monetary assistance. Jurieu and other apologists were successful in raising awareness of the dangers presented by Catholicism. The political situation contributed; the 1680s were also the period of the Glorious Revolution in England and the victory of William III, who helped make England a leader in the Protestant world. Stanwood traces the movements of the Huguenots as they used existing networks to migrate from cities on the French Atlantic coast to Dutch and English ports, or overland to Geneva and from there to other Swiss cantons and onto the Netherlands, Brandenburg, and England. In so doing, they expanded the networks that were crucial to their survival and to the idea of a Protestant International. Jurieu also provides the ideological link between religious refuge and colonization. The goal was...