The overseas missionary endeavours of British Methodists have been relatively neglected by historians. The standard history of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), written by G. G. Findlay and W. W. Holdsworth and published in five volumes between 1921 and 1924, is a ponderous affair that has not fared well in comparison with Eugene Stock's four volumes on the history of the Church Missionary Society. The overseas missions of the non-Wesleyan branches of Methodism have suffered still more severely from this historiographical neglect. The appearance of these two volumes by John Pritchard, who was General Secretary of the Methodist Church Overseas Division – the final incarnation of the Methodist Missionary Society – from 1991 to 1996, is therefore to be welcomed. Pritchard's work draws upon a collaborative project on Methodist mission history initiated by Andrew Walls and co-ordinated by Kirsty J. Murray that began in 2002. The volumes have the feel of a bicentennial institutional history, though it is largely fortuitous that the first volume appeared in 2013, two hundred years after Wesleyans formed their first district missionary society at Leeds in October 1813 (the national missionary society was not constituted until 1818).

Pritchard's knowledge of his denomination's missionary history is encyclopaedic, and these two volumes will become standard sources of reference for historians unfamiliar with the intricacies of denominational traditions. His grasp of mission history as a whole, and of the now abundant secular scholarship that interprets it from a variety of disciplinary and postcolonial perspectives, is more uneven. As might be expected, Pritchard views the historical landscape through spectacles of a Methodist tint. Non-Methodist Christians who make their guest appearance on his denominational stage are not always fleshed out: Sam Sharpe, the chief instigator of the pivotal slave rebellion in Jamaica in 1831–2, has his place, but his Baptist affiliation is not mentioned. Conversely, figures revered among an older generation of the Methodist faithful but who are scarcely known more widely, are sometimes mentioned without sufficient introduction. Thus the impact in Britain in 1880–1 of the furlough addresses of David Hill, a Wesleyan missionary who had witnessed first-hand the great north China famine of 1877–9, is compared to that of ‘David Livingstone's earlier and Bill Platt's later’ (vol. i. 127). Readers unaware of who Bill Platt was have to proceed to volume ii. 75–7, and there make their own connection with William J. Platt, the missionary who in the mid-1920s skilfully harvested for the WMMS much of the fruit of William Wadé Harris's remarkable ministry of conversion on the Ivory Coast.

There are many strands in Pritchard's narrative that merit reflection among a wider scholarly community. Two in particular may be identified. The first relates to the ecclesiological distinctiveness of Methodism as originally a connexion of voluntary societies. Precisely because those societies over time became the Methodist Church, the WMMS was never a voluntary society in the same sense as the Baptist, Church or London Missionary Societies. Rather it was, as a 1942 minute of the Methodist Conference expressed it, ‘the Methodist Church itself organized for mission overseas’. Although the power of stationing missionaries always resided in the Conference, the boundary between Missionary Society and Church was indistinct. In the nineteenth century the Mission House at Bishopsgate was the only denominational headquarters. The Missionary Secretaries – above all Jabez Bunting – became the primary target of the reforming zeal of anti-Buntingites during the ‘Fly-Sheets’ controversy of 1846–9. What the wider implications were of this Methodist way of doing mission is a theme that Pritchard does not explore, though he points out one important consequence: the term ‘missionary’ was in nineteenth-century Wesleyanism reserved to ordained preachers and denied to laymen. In practice, Methodists, like Scottish Presbyterians, subjugated missionary initiatives to central denominational control in a way that was true of neither Baptists, Anglicans nor Congregationalists. The second theme is one that Pritchard begins to open up in his second volume in a noteworthy chapter on ‘Christian mission and the faith of others’. Methodists in the twentieth century were in the vanguard of Protestant reconceptualisation of the relationship between Christianity and other religions. Names such as D. T. Niles, Wesley Ariarajah and Kenneth Cracknell in the field of Christianity and Asian religions, or Edwin Smith, Geoffrey Parrinder and E. B. Idowu in the field of Christian understanding of African indigenous religions, have left their mark far beyond the reaches of their own denomination. Why this should be so is an intriguing question. Was there some intrinsic theological logic that led those reared in Wesley's tradition of unlimited free grace to pursue more unhesitatingly than others questions about the reach of divine love to those who remained outside of Christianity? Pritchard hints at this thesis without ever really seeking to argue for it. His theological sympathies clearly lie with those who in the later twentieth century came to the conclusion that calling adherents of other faiths to convert to Christianity was no longer – if it ever had been – appropriate. The irony, of course, is that if the Methodists who form the substance of his narrative had believed that, there would be no world Methodist community today, and no need for these two informative volumes of Methodist mission history.