Jesuit Missionaries and Missions in the Iberian Colonial World

Abstract

This chapter aims to analyze the Jesuit missionaries and their missions in colonial America (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries) based on the categories of globalness (the global) and mundanity (the local) through three historical frameworks: first, the missionary expansion of the Society of Jesus from the viceroyalty of Peru and its ties to Rome and the Iberian monarchy in the sixteenth century; second, presenting the defensive war project implemented on Chile’s southern border between 1612 and 1626 as a missionary and political mechanism of territorial and spiritual “reduction”; and third, changes in missionary identity in the eighteenth century. The first two frameworks are based on case studies that give a view of the local dimension while at the same time allowing one to understand the global dynamics of the Society of Jesus in other colonial spaces. The third framework is based on broader geographical travel.