There is a global turn afoot in the study of Jesuit missions. Coinciding with the publication of Luke Clossey's book Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York: Cambridge University, 2011) and on the heals of Liam Matthew Brockey's Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2009), Takao Abé compares the Iberian missions of Japan and Paraguay with the French missions of North America in his book The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in the Light of the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan. The result is an international perspective that accounts for the methodologies and ideologies that connected Jesuit missions throughout the world, with only partial recognition of how missionaries adapted this shared Jesuit worldview to the peculiar circumstances of Christianization in Asia and the Americas. Abé's attention to global connections between Jesuit missions places The Jesuit Mission to New France at the cutting edge of early Jesuit scholarship.

The Jesuit Mission to New France can be read as an extended historiographical analysis and “diachronic global comparison” (1) of Jesuit missions in North America and Japan. Chapter 1 is a general review of literature on the two missionary fields. Chapter 2 describes the “Jesuit biases” at play in the interpretation of “non-Christian cultures” in New France and Japan (47). Chapter 3 shows how the evangelistic methodologies employed in the Iberian missions of Japan served as a prototype for the French missions of North America. Moreover, in the case of New France, Abé is critical of the typical distinction between the “cultural absolutism” of Franciscan missionaries and the “cultural relativism” of Jesuit missionaries. Chapter 4 is a reconsideration of the réductions model of evangelization in Jesuit missions. Far from a novel mode of missionary work, Abé identifies the Hizen villages of Japan and the reducciónes of Paraguay as prototypes for the réductions of New France. And chapter 5 examines the process of conversion among Japanese and Amerindian peoples. In doing so, Abé notices “a vast gulf between the Jesuits' appraisal of non-European converts and the non-Europeans' practice of Christianity” (200).

Abé's overall argument hinges on the contention that “the Christian mission in Japan provides a useful approach for revising the currently accepted historical interpretations of events in New France” (201). And he is right; it is helpful. But it is not groundbreaking. The Jesuit Mission to New France points historians in the direction of a global study of Jesuit missions, but it doesn't introduce much original research to that study. Like Abé, historians have long argued that Jesuits were biased observers of Japanese and Amerindian culture, that Jesuits employed a variety of evangelistic strategies to convert indigenous populations, and that the experience of conversion varied widely among Japanese and Amerindian Christians. Abé's comparison of Japanese Hizen villages, Paraguayan reducciónes, and French réductions is the most original feature of The Jesuit Mission to New France. However, evidence for an intentional, systematic connection between Jesuit missionary strategies in Japan, Paraguay, and North America remains slight.

The Jesuit Mission to New France is best read as a comparative historiographical analysis of Iberian Jesuits in Japan and French Jesuits in North America. Those who are unfamiliar with the history of religion in Japan will gain the most from this book, since it is so rare that English- and French-speaking historians have the opportunity to learn from a trilingual (English, French, Japanese) scholar like Abé. Those who are looking for insight into the history of religion in New France will find The Jesuit Mission to New France to be a nice companion to recent books by Sophie White, Tracy Neal Leavelle, Jennifer Spear, and Brett Rushforth, as well as the standard books by Bruce Trigger, Carole Blackburn, and Allan Greer. And for those at work on other histories of the Society of Jesus, Abé's global approach to the study of Jesuit missions serves a harbinger of things to come in the field of Jesuit studies.