The application of this framework, however, is “soft,” and consists in great part in renaming religious organizations as “firms,” missionary stations as “franchises,” religious activists as “entrepreneurs” and their targets as “customers.” This perspective works largely as a lens that contributes to “de-familiarize readers from social entities (‘Islam,’ ‘Christianity’) and actors (‘Muslims,’ ‘Christians’) they assume they already know.” Before addressing a few broader issues related to the project, it is necessary to survey the various “micro-stories” that are woven together in the book and organized into three different parts.

The words “exchange” and “economies” in the title allude to economical and rational choice theories applied to the study of religion-this is of course nothing new, with Stark and Bainbridge’s A Theory of Religion having already reached the venerable age of thirty. Pursuing the discussion initiated in his earlier book, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915, Green analyzes various, idiosyncratic, forms of religion (especially Islam) produced in contexts characterized by high religious heterogeneity and competition (especially Iran and India). They are all actors in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global history of religious exchange. In Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam Nile Green tells us how and why. What is the common denominator between distinguished Oxbridge Orientalists, a German Christian missionary active on the shores of the Caspian Sea, a Sufi master based in Aurangabad, a mentally-ill Muslim Sepoy perceived as a holy man, and the founder of the first purpose-built mosque in Detroit? At first sight, not much, except that they are all connected to the subject of religion in one way or the other. Philippe Bornet on Nile Green’s Terrains of Exchange Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam, Oxford University Press, 2014, 288 pp., $37.50

Bombay Islam by Nile Green