This volume of essays originated from a 2016 conference on missions and commerce at the Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud in Paris. Both the conference and the volume focus on the financial dimensions of Catholic (largely Jesuit) missions in the early modern period. The effort to spread Catholic Christianity and convert souls across vast distances required enormous and ongoing financial outlays to train, transport, and support missionaries; run schools; build churches; and create religious literature. These essays drive home a central point that missions were inextricably intertwined with profit-making ventures, which constantly threatened to sully the spiritual enterprise. The editors, Hélène Vu Thanh and Ines G. Županov, provide a framework in the introduction and epilogue, respectively, that effectively corrals very disparate case studies, connects them to major lines of debate, and offers an overarching interpretive agenda. Županov argues in the epilogue that Jesuits (and presumably other missionaries) adapted themselves to the language and principles of merchant capitalism in pursuing spiritual markets (souls), acting as spiritual merchants (evangelizers), and managing spiritual franchises (local operations).
The essays themselves pay rich dividends as local case studies of trade and finance and at important hubs of missionary activity across the early modern world. Vu Thanh and Županov introduce the work as an attempt to employ connected history to address the dichotomy between finance and mission in historical scholarship. They group the nine essays into four parts, which helps give the volume thematic coherence.
Part 1 discusses missionaries as traders. Vu Thanh examines Jesuit commercial endeavors at the port of Nagasaki and Claudio Ferlan investigates the order's production of yerba maté in the reductions of South America. Vu Thanh shows that Jesuits functioned as important traders of silk, mediated between Portuguese and Japanese merchants, and assumed control over political administration in the city from 1580 to 1587. Ferlan discusses the Jesuit turn to native yerba maté cultivation to support settlements and missions and to protect Tupi-Guarani peoples from exploitation at the hands of encomenderos. Part 2 concentrates on integration into local economies. Rômulo da Silva Ehalt focuses on Jesuit land ownership in Japan; Christian Windler discusses the convent economy of Discalced Carmelites in Isfahan and Basra; and Ryan D. Crewe sketches out the commercial networks that missionaries exploited in maritime Asia. Ehalt describes Jesuits, having received Nagasaki as a gift from the Ōmura daimyo in 1580, administering a wide range of governmental actions. Carmelites in Persia, Windler argues, resorted to selling rosewater, investing in real estate, and charging for lodging to survive. Crewe concludes that Catholic missionaries immersed themselves in both the trading diasporas of the Indian Ocean and internally in the Philippines, the only territory in Asia that came under Spanish control.
Part 3 devotes attention to funding missions. Ariane Boltanski scrutinizes funding for Jesuit colleges in France and Italy, while Sébastien Malaprade analyzes the Jesuit college of San Hermenegildo in Seville and its participation in global trade and regional land markets. In Europe, Jesuits fell into dependence on lay patrons who exercised their own influence over college operations and personnel. The Jesuits in Seville also felt constraints over the economic activity, resulting from a damaged reputation caused by the college's bankruptcy in 1645. Finally, part 4 considers the debates circulating around the involvement of religious orders in profit-making. Tara Alberts unpacks Jacques de Bourges's (ca. 1634–1714) Relation du voyage de Monseigneur l'Evêque de Beryte (1666) as an investment prospectus. She contends that Bourges sought to provide guidance for commercial activity by stressing the spiritual discipline incumbent upon missionaries engaged in these practices. Fabian Fechner turns to correspondence and memoirs among Jesuits in the Paraguay Reductions to make sense of how Jesuits negotiated the parameters of licit financial activity. He emphasizes the fluidity of perspectives and the mediation involved in sorting out financial calculations on the ground.
The essays provide fascinating glimpses into the contortions, compromises, and consequences of efforts to fund Catholic missions in the early modern period. As a whole, the volume outlines fruitful lines of inquiry and useful ways of approaching commerce and conversion that will be of interest to scholars of capitalism, missionary endeavor, and empire building from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
