The field of Mormon studies was once isolated, in Jan Shipps’s memorable phrase, like a “donut hole” in the larger field of U.S. Western history. Today, although many historians remain uncomfortable with the subject of religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is no longer uniquely set apart. With Imperial Zions, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto adds to a burgeoning scholarship that locates Latter-day Saints as very much a part of the history of empire-building in the American West and across the Pacific world. And while the book is unevenly argued, it raises an essential set of questions that future historians of this church will be unable to ignore.

Hendrix-Komoto aims to connect the Latter-day Saints’ distinctive theology and practice of plural marriage with their simultaneous participation in U.S. imperial expansion. Ideas about gender and the family, she notes, were (and still are) inextricably tied up with the racial hierarchies...

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