Jeremy Morris (ed.),
The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume IV. Global Western Anglicanism, c 1910-present
Oxford: OUP, 2017

My review of this recent volume appeared a few weeks back in Reading Religion, the review journal of the American Academy of Religion. It began:

 

What, precisely, is Anglicanism, that a history of it may be written? The several contributors to the recent Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies (reviewed here) returned again and again to the means by which Anglican identity might be defined. For the writing of history, are there certain markers of Anglican thought and practice that might form the unit of analysis (“Anglicanism” as a system of ideas rather than an institution)? Is the history of Anglicanism in fact the history of the relationships between the autonomous and (largely) national provinces of which the Anglican Communion is composed, and the global institutions in which those relationships are partially embodied? Or, is the history of Anglicanism actually a set of parallel histories of individual churches in their local, national, and regional contexts? For the most part, the volume under review takes the last of these three approaches, while paying careful attention to the interactions between individual churches and larger trends in political and cultural history to which they all were required to respond.

 

The review then expounds the general argument of the volume, and then notes that it is focussed on Anglicans in the West: Great Britain and Ireland, North America, and Australasia, but:

There were of course other Anglicans than those of the West; readers will need to await a treatment of African and Asian Anglicanism in volume 5 of this series, due to appear in print in early 2018. The division between the two volumes is defensible — indeed, it is perhaps the best division that can be made if one must be made — but there are several occasions here where the dictates of the theme require the authors to trespass outside the scope of the volume. This is no great difficulty, but the volume is also let down in places in the execution of particular chapters. Many are fine examples of their type, in particular those by Avis, Grimley, Moyse, Snape, and Stockwell. Others are chaotically organized, with, in one case, a verbatim repeat of three sentences on consecutive pages. [One other chapter in particular is] poorly done, lacking analytical precision and awareness of context, and based on an inadequate range of sources. The geographical survey of North America is too concentrated on the US and on the period since 1970; that for Australasia loses all sense of thematic coherence in a chronological procession of events. More generally, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada feature less than does the US, which in turn is less prominent than Britain. English material also predominates over Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. This is understandable given the relative weights of the published literature on each country, but as one reads there is often a subtle slippage where an English example is made to do duty as a representative of the whole.

Overall, however, I thought that the volume as a whole is:

a valuable first synthetic account of Anglicanism in the West in a crucial period. Although surely priced beyond the means of most private readers, no serious library for history or theology will want to be without it. A question remains over the longevity which the book may expect, given the implicit intent of monumental series such as this that they may stand for a generation or more. Readers who take the volume as a whole may be struck, as this reviewer was, by the cumulative weight given to the issues that have so troubled Anglicans in the last two decades, human sexuality and the ordination of women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this focus is most pronounced in some of the chapters written by those who are both historians and clergy. We will need to leave it to the reader of 2037 to determine whether these were really the most significant issues in world Anglicanism in the twentieth century when viewed from a greater distance.