The recent revelations about slave owning at Georgetown in the nineteenth century have resulted in a renewed interest in Jesuit views on the frequently intertwined issues of slavery and race. In this volume, historians of the Society of Jesus address the question of race (and to some extent, of slavery) from various perspectives, from the order's foundation in the mid sixteenth century to the present day, although the main focus is on the early modern period (the “Old Society”).
Through historiographical discussions of the Jesuits’ role in the wider story of slavery and race in the Atlantic World (in which the Society emerges as fairly representative of mainstream thinking), the book charts the development of Jesuit views from the relatively enlightened stance of Ignatius Loyola on admitting New Christians as members to full-scale complicity in racialized slavery in Missouri, and finally to the postwar embrace of equality and civil rights. This multifaceted and far from heroic story is quite different from that found in the many histories written by members of the Society during its modern scholarship heyday, from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries, which tended to sidestep the issue entirely.
The chapters generally foreground one figure or text to offer a particular perspective on Jesuit views on race, for the most part on the basis of original research. For instance, Emanuele Colombo's opening article on Antonio Possevino's stance on the admission of New Christians to the Society following the death of its founder provides important background to the rest of the volume: it shows the ways that European (and particularly Iberian) ideas about “race” were inflected by religion, culture, and the uncertain dynamics of early modern Christian societies in a constant state of turmoil. This point is later made explicit by J. Michelle Molina, who helpfully spells out the “complex ethno-religious social factors that figure into colonial status marking” (135). Liam Brockey then underlines the similarly contingent nature of slave status in his discussion of African and Asian slavery in Macau and Nagasaki. As he explains, any analysis of the status of the variety of slaves (moços cativos), indentured servants, and others in Asia must pay attention to the vague and shifting terminology used in Portuguese sources (for example, moço/a, criado/a) and the Jesuit “accommodation” of local norms surrounding bondage.
Although most of the volume focuses on Europe and the Americas (pace Liam Brockey)—and so belies the growing literature on Jesuit interactions with slavery in Asia that is documented in both European and Asian languages—there are nonetheless perspectives from outside the canonical geographies of the United States, southern Europe, Mexico, and central Peru. For instance, Andrew Redden's chapter on Jesuit racial thinking on the Chilean frontier is a welcome addition to the volume. Redden takes a quantitative approach to the letters of Luis de Valdivia (1560–1642), and reveals (among other things) that social function and enmity versus friendship were the most important qualifying categories of racial terms like indio, an understandable scenario given the highly unstable nature of borderlands like Chile.
As with all edited volumes, there is a degree of unevenness in the treatment of the book's core concerns. However, perhaps because of the relative coherence of the scholarship on the Old Society, this collection hangs together better than most. This, and the individual contributions of the volume's authors, make this book undeniably important reading for historians of slavery and racialization (especially in the Americas) and for anyone interested in the important role played by the Society of Jesus in world history. While the question of race arises passim in many other studies of the Jesuits, this volume offers both a helpful historiographical overview and a series of focused discussions based on primary sources and rewards close reading by generalists and specialists alike.
