This is the first truly global study of the Society of Jesus's early missions. Up to now historians have treated the early-modern Catholic missionary project as a disjointed collection of regional missions rather than as a single world-encompassing example of religious globalization. Luke Clossey shows how the vast distances separating missions led to logistical problems of transportation and communication incompatible with traditional views of the Society as a tightly centralized military machine. In fact, connections unmediated by Rome sprung up between the missions throughout the seventeenth century. He follows trails of personnel, money, relics and information between missions in seventeenth-century China, Germany and Mexico, and explores how Jesuits understood space and time and visualized universal mission and salvation. This pioneering study demonstrates that a global perspective is essential to understanding the Jesuits and will be required reading for historians of Catholicism and the early-modern world.

“full of wonderfully unexpected connections, and overflowing with ideas and proposals for a new global history of the early modern period”Journal of Global History 4.2 (2009): 342-44

“extremely learned, poised, and ambitious”American Historical Review 114.5 (2009): 1418-9

“brilliantly argued book, rich in source materials as well as in analysis, highly readable and at times outright witty”Social History 34.3 (2009): 350-52