Methodists and their Missionary Societies 1760–1900. By John Pritchard. Ashgate Methodist Studies. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. xxiii + 293pp. $119.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Methodists and their Missionary Societies 1760-1900 . By John Pritchard . Ashgate Methodist Studies. Burlington, Vt. : Ashgate Publishing , 2013. xxiii + 293pp. $119.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesFor at least a generation, scholars interested in the history of Methodism in the British Isles and the United States have been treated to many high quality books that explore this religious movement with sensitivity and depth. Methodism outside the North Atlantic world, however, has not benefited from the same historiographical focus. As such, Pritchard's concise history of British Methodist foreign missions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a welcome addition to an open field and will provide a helpful foundation for future scholarship.The bulk of Pritchard's book concerns early Methodist mission efforts and the work of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS). He also seeks to include the work of other Methodist denominations that joined in the Methodist Union of 1932 in his story. British Methodist missions in the twentieth century are covered in a companion volume.As the author notes in the preface, there are detailed accounts of Methodist missions in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most published about a century ago. These sources are used, with other primary and secondary texts, to inform the narrative. While Pritchard casts his own work as a "much more concise and less comprehensive history" than those earlier works in seeking to cover "the same ground from a more distant vantage point," the author's intent is actually more ambitious than he admits (xvii). He reframes the story of Methodist foreign missions in the light of more recent academic scholarship on the history of Christian missions. Among other objectives, this newer historiography has sought to reclaim the importance of indigenous Christians in the emergence of new Christian communities, recognizes the centrality of missionary women in the Protestant missionary movement, and rejects assumptions of European superiority that can pervade source material.Initial chapters detail the background and foundations of the Methodist missionary enterprise. This background includes the brief service of both John and Charles Wesley as Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) missionaries, the emergence of Methodist societies outside the British Isles through colonial connections and migration, and the dedicated, yet impulsive, endeavors of Thomas Coke. The year 1813 marks a transition point as it signaled the beginning of new opportunities for Christian missions in India, the launch of the first auxiliary society to raise funds for missions, and Coke's departure for Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Methodist beginnings in North American and Australasia are briefly summarized up until the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the newly-independent United States and creation of autonomous conferences in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand/Aotearoa in the mid-nineteenth century.The primary focus of the book, however, is foreign, cross-cultural missions operated by British Methodists. Pritchard introduces this focus with three chapters that explore issues that span multiple contexts. …