Divine Imperium and the Ecclesiastical Imaginary: Church History, Transnationalism, and the Rationality of Empire

Laurie Maffly-Kipp's address to the American Society of Church History proffers the challenge of engaging seriously with the “church” in church history. She notes that scholarship on Christianity has increasingly focused on broader cultural themes in lieu of a more strict concern with churches as institutions in their own right. Maffly-Kipp's challenge reminded me of a particular context in the history of Christianity: the eighteenth-century city-state of Ogua (or, more familiarly, Cape Coast), in present-day Ghana. In the 1750s, the family of a local youth sent their child, Philip Quaque, to study abroad in London under the auspices of the Anglican Church. The young Quaque spent the next eleven years of this life cultivating expertise in Anglican liturgy, Christian theology, and British mores. Before returning home in his early twenties, he was ordained to the Anglican priesthood—the first African to have done so.