As Luke Clossey tells us at the outset, Salvation and globalization ‘describes the early Jesuits’ participation in Christianity as a global religion, and their construction of Christianity as a universal religion’ (p. 9). Clossey sets out to accomplish his goals by examining Jesuit institutions, spirituality, and psychology within the context of what he calls ‘early modern world Catholicism’, covering the period between the 1580s and 1700. The succession of chapters moves from a description of the Jesuit internal organization, with its strengths and limitations in global reach (chapters 2 and 3), through an examination of Jesuit missionary imagination, psychology, and motivation (chapters 4–6), to a description of the interlocking networks – missionary, financial, informational, and spiritual – that sustained the global ambitions of the Jesuits, and elicited the support of their secular and ecclesiastical patrons (chapters 7–10). The introduction and the concluding chapter on ‘global salvific Catholicism’ touch upon a vast array of historiographical debates in the fields of Jesuit studies, early modern European history, world history, and the history of Christianity.

With a refreshing sense of amazement at what he calls the ‘jarringly unfamiliar customs and beliefs’ of early modern Jesuits, Clossey follows T. O. Beidelman’s 1974 callFootnote ¹ to look at the missionaries themselves as worthy ‘subjects for wonder and analysis’, in a sort of ‘anthropological research of a subject extraordinary in its banality’ (p. 8). Early modern Jesuit missionary spirituality and psychology might have seemed ‘banal’ and been taken for granted by the often long-forgotten Jesuit historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries profusely quoted by the wide-ranging Clossey. But, to our own contemporaries (and especially to our young undergraduate students, instantly connected through their cell phones and laptops to a world framed by commercial globalization), the mentality, spirituality, and motivations of those priests and their supporters must seem truly extraordinary. This book has the merit to remind us (a trend that has been gaining much strength in recent years) that religious motivation should be taken seriously, not simply as an epiphenomenon of politics and economics, an empty superstructure. Moreover, Clossey also reminds us that it is unwise to imagine religion as separate from economics or politics: especially in the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a ‘sacred economy’ of relics, prayers, and rituals (described in chapter 10) was fuelled by financial resources and political backing from aristocrats and ecclesiastics in Europe and the colonies, and by merchants along the routes of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian oceans. Within this global economy of the sacred, salvation of souls (their own, and those of others) always remained the main objective of clergymen and lay people alike.

Clossey’s ‘global salvific Catholicism’ is a useful conceptual synthesis. In it we find the old Christian urge to procure the salvation of as many souls as possible, framed within the newer imagination of a global Christianity and of an even greater harvest of souls, made possible to a large extent by the European conquest of the Americas, and by the opening of commercial routes and colonial entrepôts in Africa and Asia. Ironically, however, even if this book purports to describe a ‘global Christianity’, it ultimately depicts a fully European enterprise. The book, in Clossey’s words, is ‘a study of missionaries, and it includes their converts only occasionally, and only to better illuminate the missionaries themselves’ (p. 9). Important portions of the early modern global Catholic context, including lay communitarian practices and beliefs in the missions, and Jesuit participation in them, remain marginal to the monograph’s narrative. We rarely hear the voices of any ‘global Christians’ other than the fifty-three central European Jesuits selected as a representative sample, their superiors in the Society of Jesus, and the emperors, kings, dukes, archbishops, and noblewomen based in Spain and New Spain, Portugal and Goa, and the German lands, who lent their money and their prayers to the enterprise.

Clossey’s ambitious objective is to unify in a global field all Jesuit missions: ‘By emphasizing the missionaries over the potential converts and by focusing on the process of salvation at the core of the attendant power plays and cultural negotiation, we restore the essential unity of these seemingly disparate missions’ (p. 240). If unity of intent in Jesuit education and spiritual training is undeniable, can we say that spending most of one’s adult life in a mission station in central China or Baja California, far removed from confreres and other Europeans, immersed in the social fabric of native societies, would not make an isolated Jesuit a full participant in the locale where he happened to live, speak in native tongues, interact day after day with ‘potential converts’? Would that Jesuit’s primary cultural identity and religious sensibility remain first and foremost linked to the global project of the Society of Jesus (or even to his own original national identities) as outlined by Clossey, or be influenced and modified as strongly by the new local context? Alas, the written intentions of superiors and patrons in Europe, and the letters written to those superiors and patrons back from the missions to get their approval and financial support may not always be the best sources to explore how the missionary experience played out in the field and in the lives of individual missionaries. Unfortunately, the archives containing the correspondence among missionaries in the field have usually perished: we will almost certainly never know what a Jesuit in Beijing would write to a confrere in Hangzhou regarding the daily life of their communities, and matters too mundane (and perhaps too petty or personal), to figure in a report to Europe.

Ultimately, Clossey unequivocally links his reconstruction of the multiple global Jesuit networks to the emergence of ‘modernity’. Although he sees the Jesuits as partly ‘medieval’ in their religious sensibility, he points to their ‘awareness of causality’ (p. 253) among disparate and far-flung phenomena as a distinctively modern characteristic. It is an awareness that only the Jesuits (as beneficiaries of the European expansion) possessed, unlike the Ming Chinese merchant who ignored how the Spanish silver from Potosì affected his country’s domestic inflation. Clossey concludes that, together with European merchants, European missionaries ‘fashioned the early-modern world and the globalization that integrated it’ (p. 255). The fleets of Chinese, Malay, and Indian commercial ships plying the waters of Asia, the export industries of China, the internal economic and social dynamics of Africa, and the life of the native peoples in the New World colonies, seem to be, once again, only the backdrop in a historical chain of European causality and European-led globalization.

That said, this book is full of wonderfully unexpected connections, and overflowing with ideas and proposals for a new global history of the early modern period. More work will be needed to integrate Clossey’s synthetic picture of the Jesuit worldwide networks within the fabric of a fully global history, which several other innovative scholars have recently been writing, and continue to write. This can be accomplished by further clarifying how Catholic missionary global networks fitted within the broader context of the economic and cultural exchanges between Europeans and other peoples, and within the non-European social milieus that the missionaries encountered. Perhaps such research may also show us how a new global awareness emerged not only among Europeans but also among inhabitants and rulers of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, who participated in, opposed, or cautiously monitored the dynamics of European cultural, religious, economic, and military expansion. Otherwise, whose ‘globalization’ would it be?