Paul Grant

Biography

I am a historian of cross-cultural encounter, above all in West Africa, and above all at the level of religion, which is the realm of life in which Africans have been most successful at dictating the terms of their relationships with others. My 2020 book examines a mid-nineteenth century refugee crisis in a small mountain kingdom in today’s Ghana. I find that locals, who over three hundred years of encounter with Europeans on the coast had shown nearly no interest in Christianity, began to reconfigure that religion as an indigenous tool for assimilating refugees into existing social structures.