Americans have no shortage of books on the Pilgrim Fathers, and they annually renew quaint impressions of the Plymouth colonists dining with Native Americans at the first Thanksgiving. But in Making Haste from Babylon, Nick Bunker opens a new world—which happens to be in the Old World—in which English Protestant radicalism was born. Bunker, a former investment banker and writer for the Financial Times, nicely blends economic and religious history, highlighting the significance of Plymouth's trade in beaver pelts, while still appreciating the spiritual seriousness of their mission.

It is not the case, contrary to Bunker's claim, that previous books have left the Pilgrim narrative in "shadowy monochrome … deprived of color, light, and sound." One thinks, for instance, of the New World-centered narrative in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower (2006), which complements Bunker's English perspective. But Bunker's account freshly elucidates the turbulent English milieu of the Plymouth colonists, offering a welcome reminder that their story's action had started decades before they (figuratively) stepped onto Plymouth Rock.

Bunker writes in evocative phrases, as when he describes the hold of the Mayflower as "smelling of vinegar, vomit, stale meat, and overripe cheese." He is willing both to dispense with Pilgrim mythology (he dismisses the first Thanksgiving as insignificant) and affirm the colony's importance (he embraces a traditional interpretation of the Mayflower Compact's consequence). The main problem with Making Haste from Babylon results from his zeal for the topic: we get pages and pages of data on subjects like what features of modern Scrooby the Pilgrims would not have seen. Hopefully this flood of sometimes extraneous facts will not deter readers from what is now one of the finest histories of the religious and economic setting of English colonization.

Thomas S. Kidd is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, and author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, coming in October from Basic Books.

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