ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on long experience with the archive of the Basel Mission. It demonstrates mainly how, when new material becomes available both on the social history of the region from which the missionaries originated and one of the regions where they worked overseas, important clarifications can emerge, new historical dimensions be sketched, and dynamic perspectives for further exploration be made visible. However, truly transregional research in the sense of the comparative analysis of two overseas regions for which a mission archive has materials is difficult. Akuapem was, in fact, the first and longest focus of Basel Mission work in the interior of Ghana, and this chapter presents aspects of the innovative impact of that literature on the history of the Basel Mission and its successor church there. It could become a serious resource for transregional studies of the social history around the mission and its successor churches, and of more general studies that find mission archive's resources useful.
