Tranquebar: Charting the Protestant International in the British Atlantic and Beyond

Abstract

From Boston to London, Germany to India, Protestants understood missionary work as a global process, one that flouted denominational, geopolitical, and oceanic divisions. The rise of Tranquebar, a Danish-controlled Indian seaport housing a German mission that was backed by London Anglicans and Puritan New Englanders, showcases how such connections were forged and what they meant for the people who created them. Tranquebar was one of the most widely lauded mission sites among British evangelists in the Atlantic world, but it was neither British nor in the Atlantic. Letters, sacred texts, anti-Catholic rhetoric, and a vision of a global Protestant takeover united Protestant evangelists and forged an expansive imagined community that scholars have called the “Protestant International.” And yet for British Protestants in the wider Atlantic, these connections fluctuated, evolved, and were ultimately unsustainable. The rise and fall of Tranquebar as an international and interdenominational mission site thus demonstrates the potential as well as the limits of a global approach to understanding the development of evangelical networks and transoceanic communities.