Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack

Abstract

In the rapidly expanding area of Global Reformation studies, most of the work to date has been done on Catholic missions and colonisation. Many of the new Orders generated out of the Catholic Reformation from the fifteenth century onwards, including the Ursulines, Jesuits, Capuchins and Récollets, had international missions as a deliberate focus and competed to be the first into China, Japan, Mexico or Peru. Many lay confraternal and charitable groups, such as the Portuguese and then Spanish Misericordias, followed their work of opening hospitals and shelters in Iberia with new establishments serving colonists and indigenous peoples in Asia and the Americas. No European Catholic power failed to recruit missionaries into its imperial project. While some missionaries, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, became harsh critics of forms of colonisation and exploitation that negated the gospel message, most navigated these paradoxes and contradictions with compasses firmly fixed on the star of Christianisation. If the effects were sometimes mitigated by new forms of Christianity shaped in part by local spiritual traditions and priorities, it is nonetheless thanks to these Catholic Reformation drives that Christianity became the religious expression of colonisation in large parts of the early modern world.