With extensive documentation covering specialist books and articles (including e-journal sources) this important monograph meets an evident need. Its subject attracts considerable popular literature but the seriously academic study of global Evangelicalism is largely undeveloped; much of its essential material (frequently in languages other than English) is restricted to specific topics, regions or countries. The almost complete five-volume IVP History of Evangelicalism (to which John Wolffe has already contributed The expansion of Evangelicalism, 2006) is deliberately confined to ‘the English speaking world’ whereas this excellent Short history has no such boundaries. In this joint work of many years its authors provide a highly informative and invariably contextualised overview of world Evangelical life and thought. Tracing its prehistory, they chart a middle course between accounts ‘that present it as an essentially new phenomenon and those that view it as a mutation in a continuous Protestant tradition’, maintaining that from its early eighteenth-century development it showed ‘strong continuities with the past’ but also ‘manifested a distinctive and innovative combination of characteristics’. Its complex origins in English Puritanism, Scottish Presbyterianism, High Church Anglicanism (particularly the late seventeenth-century voluntary societies) and continental Pietism, help to explain ‘its subsequently shifting alliances’. Such fascinating cross-currents are well-illustrated; the first book that Charles Wesley lent to the young George Whitefield at Oxford was Francke's Against the fear of man, and when the Wesley brothers and their colleagues sailed to Georgia as SPG missionaries they were deeply influenced by Moravian fellow-travellers, contacts which ‘brought a full circle to the earlier influence of English Puritan publications on the Pietists’. Subsequent chapters treat issues under continuing debate such as whether the paradigmatic ‘surprising work of God’ in New England was objective reality or ‘interpretative fiction’, and the co-existence of colonialism and missionary expansion and later indigenisation. The developing story is set in the context of the catastrophic impact of the 1914–18 war (with 40 per cent of surviving Canadian chaplains resigning their orders), noting Evangelicalism's international dimension and strenuously renewed social outreach following the Second World War, the ‘slow-motion train wreck of traditional denominations’, the growing mega-church phenomenon as a response to urbanisation, the rising influence of Islam, the increasing repression and persecution of Christians whatever their theological convictions, and the ongoing consequences of the ‘Arab Spring’ challenging previous oligarchical and even despotic control. It addresses specific concerns in the contemporary scene where ‘Evangelical Christians are irretrievably widespread and diverse and yet more active than ever before’, facing the challenge of world pluralism and ‘the sustainability of the experiential détente which knits together Evangelicalism and pentecostalism’. The book's aim ‘to reference, summarise and relate the now received arguments about Evangelicalism and to extract a critical narrative which takes Evangelicalism seriously’ is admirably realised and its value enhanced by a detailed index.