In the past few decades thanks to a new interest in imperial history by J.G.A. Pocock and others, and by debate on the influence of “Britishness” on protestant identity initiated by historians such as Linda Colley, historical interest has broadened from a North American focus to include the reciprocal influences of colonizer and colonies within a transatlantic context. Todd Webb's Transatlantic Methodists is the first Canadian study to apply this framework to religion. Short-listed for the Canadian Historical Association's prestigious Sir John A. Macdonald prize, the book turns upside down the traditional narrative of Methodism's trajectory from a revivalist movement with strong American roots and radical impulses to a staid conservative truly “Canadian” church. Instead this is an account of an exchange that centers on the leaders of the Wesleyan church in Britain, the missionaries they sent to central Canada, and the Canadian Conference that had initially been a mission field of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Drawing on extensive British historiography and a wide range of primary sources, in particular the wealth of correspondence emanating from the London-based Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), Webb depicts the growing integration of Methodists in Canada into the British world. The result is a recasting of a familiar (and often bewilderingly complicated) conflict between two groups of Methodists into an equally contentious disagreement over what it meant to be British and Wesleyan. Throughout this debate Canadian Methodists are perceived not as “forerunners of the modern nation, but as Britons and Wesleyans transplanted in the New World” (8). The thesis relies heavily on a detailed analysis of the discourse and personalities shaping the transatlantic exchange, but what could be a dull subject is lightened by Webb's wry wit and ability to take some critical distance from the earnest tone of his sources.

Much of the freshness of the work arises from its structure. Rather than following a well-trod path in North American Methodist historiography that begins with revivalism as popular religion and then charts its inevitable declension and transition to institutionalization and “middle class respectability,” here institutional control and British middle class interests are present from the beginning. In carefully interrelated chapters Webb lays out the development and organization of the WMMS and follows this with a detailed examination of the Society's influence in reshaping cultural patterns among both the British Wesleyan and the older group of Canadian Methodists. In both groups, clergy and laity frequently found themselves pitted against an intransigent mother church under the direction of a tightly-knit group of preachers around the autocratic Jabez Bunting. Not surprisingly given the ever-increasing imperatives of the expanding British empire, Wesleyan mission financing was a major source of disagreement between the metropole and periphery when it came to defining the implications of being British. The WMMS's unwillingness to pay any more colonial bills ultimately accelerated Methodist unity in the colony, though not at the price of letting the connectional authorities in the home country forget that where money was concerned “the Canadian Methodists were Britons and Wesleyans” (134).

Not until the final chapter does the attention turn to revivalism, camp meetings, and pastoral authority and how their evolving transatlantic context created a distinctive British Wesleyan culture in central Canada. Following a period of sustained conflict and disagreement among all three parties, the Wesleyan Church that emerged in the course of the 1850s displayed a culture broader and more inclusive than in the home country where American revivalists such as James Caughey were stoutly resisted and silenced by the “Buntingites.” Using a familiar Canadian trope of accommodation and synthesis Webb concludes: “If, by the mid-nineteenth century, Canadian Methodism was a British Wesleyan connection in terms of its church structures, it was North American in its approach to worship—and that was one of the main reasons for its success” (163).

Until now Canadian historiography has attributed the denomination's success largely to the triumph of voluntarism, championed by the Canadian Methodists who strenuously resisted British Wesleyan support for a religious establishment. Thanks to Webb's attention to the Wesleyan Missionary Society's neglected role in administration and fundraising (which continued until 1874, well after 1850, when the Church of England was finally disestablished in central Canada), this interpretation has become more complicated and nuanced. Less shaped by North American influences like revivalism and the separation of church and state, Canadian Methodism now emerges more as an offshoot of British Wesleyanism.

As is the case with any major reinterpretation, the emphasis on British identity overlooks some complicating factors. What, for example, was the place of Canadian natives in this exchange on “Britishness”? Dismissed in the introduction as “an altogether different story . . . [which] requires a separate study to do it justice” (12), missions to the natives were a primary concern to the Canadian Conference. The latter complained bitterly about the WMMS's tight purse strings, even forcing some Canadian preachers in the 1830s to depart from their voluntarist principles and accept government funding. This is a cultural history where not only natives are excluded but where ordinary lay people also lead a shadowy existence. The concerns of preachers and a few elite British Wesleyan laymen loom large, with little attention to the shape of every day piety, nor to Methodist interaction with other evangelical denominations. Given the defining role of the large-scale immigration to British North America that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the work would also have benefitted from attention to British Wesleyan settlement patterns and church planting, the latter easily available in such nineteenth-century sources as George Cornish's Cyclopedia of Methodism in Canada. That said, like any solid innovative work, Todd Webb's Transatlantic Methodists challenges the ways Canadian historians have to date understood the denomination's early nineteenth-century history, and at the same time it invites dialogue with those researching Methodism in other colonial contexts.