Francis Robinson's volume treats Muslim societies from 1800 to the present through two developments he holds inseparable. The first is Western domination, catalogued here in detail: Napoleon in Egypt, Dutch consolidation across the Indonesian archipelago, British paramountcy in India and the Gulf, Russian conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia, French advance across North and West Africa, and the dismemberment of the Ottoman lands, so that within roughly 120 years almost every Muslim people lived under European rule. The second is religious revival and reform, whose roots Robinson places well before 1800 and whose prime purpose he takes to be inner renewal, given urgency by foreign power and energised by resistance to it. He also argues that Western power reached far past borders into the structures of Muslim life, drawing economies into a global market, building bureaucratic states impatient of tribal and scholarly authority, and unsettling the madrasa. Twenty-four regional chapters follow.