Ecclesiastical Colony: China's Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate. By Ernest P. Young. London: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii + 383 pp. $74.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Ecclesiastical Colony: China's Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate . By Ernest P. Young . London : Oxford University Press , 2014. xii + 383 pp. $74.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis book has all the characteristics which make for a work of rigorous scholarship and enduring value. It deals with an interesting and important topic in a relatively understudied field; it is thorough in research and precise in documentation; it is very well written and edited; and it does not shy away from making historical judgments while remaining basically fair-minded. The author did a great deal of careful research in French archives, many of them only recently opened.The broad context of Ernest Young's endeavor is the whole history of the French missionaries in China from the late 1500s to the mid-twentieth century, and, secondarily, the Chinese Catholic church which came into existence during those centuries. His focus, the French Religious Protectorate, a somewhat informal (that is, not precisely described in diplomatic documents) set of arrangements under which the French Government, through its diplomatic officials in China, played a unique political-diplomatic role among the Western nations in modern China. The "protectorate" began in the 1840s and lasted in some aspects until the 1940s. By Young's account, suggestive rather than accusatory, the institutional results of the protectorate were an egregious case of Western imperialism in modern China.The European missionaries in China, including the French, were somewhat successful in building a Catholic church of perhaps 300,000 nationwide by the early 1700s. All of the missions were severely hit by the imperial expulsion of missionaries after the well-known "rites controversy" and then the outright proscription of Christianity in 1724. For more than a century, until the Opium War of 1839-1842, Christianity was outlawed; European priests continued to sneak into China, to give the sacraments to the faithful, but the Europeans were few, and always on the move. Moreover, there were only a few Chinese Catholic ordained priests. However, as recent scholarship has shown, this period resulted in Chinese lay Catholic leaders emerging to maintain the coherence of Christian life. The result was a dispersal of largely self-regulating Catholic communities across the land, mostly in rural and semi-rural areas. By the time the missionaries (Protestants as well as Catholics now) returned, after more than a century of absence, there was firmly in place in many Catholic communities with a considerable degree of autonomy, local Christian gentry elite managing tasks such as catechism, maintenance of the church building, and so forth.When China was forcibly opened to foreign commerce and to foreign residence after the Opium War of 1839-1842 and then the second China war in 1856-1860, the government of France in this decade established a unique place in the structure of China's relationships with the West. This was the "French religious protectorate." Conceived by diplomats and executed by them and a few French missionaries acting as translators and interpreters in the complicated negotiations to end the second China war during 1858-1860, the French government wound up having the right to represent legally and to defend the interests of all of the Catholic missions and all of the individual Catholic missionaries, of whatever nationality. …