It is perhaps a little perverse, but I began this review by looking at the bibliography: my apologies to Girolamo Imbruglia; I was not intending to treat his scholarly work like an undergraduate essay. As a work about the continental European colonial experience, written in English, I was looking to see how far the anglophone work on utopia had been brought together with that of Spain, Portugal and other European colonial powers. As a starting point, therefore, particularly given the extent of Imbruglia's research, it seems a loaded decision by the publisher not to separate out primary (manuscript and printed) and secondary works.

As Imbruglia points out, the Jesuits were themselves fearsome chroniclers of history, and although their expulsion from the Guaraní regions at the turn of 1766–7 may have been triggered by European concerns, being the writers of history allowed them to shape their own legacy and must have been in the minds of the civil authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing a history of the missions over more than two centuries, Imbruglia is conscious of a parallel discussion within political science, philosophy and theology across Europe and America about what constitutes the ideal society and, if mankind is a social being, what constitutes the ideal human. It's now more than thirty years since James Holstun, in the introduction to his Rational millennium, ostensibly about the Puritan utopian ideal of the English-speaking world, drew attention in his introduction to the dark underbelly beneath the optimism of Renaissance humanism which dominated the period during which the Jesuits and other Christians became active in the Americas. There is, however, reference to Vasco de Quiroga, Holstun's Hispanic case study.

But in his introduction Imbruglia makes his own mission clear: the section dealing with the nature of Jesuit colonisation, and thus with that which was ‘historically ascertained’, is slight and merely preparatory. He is less concerned with what the Jesuits understood by their own mission, or how it was received by those who were the object of conversion. Rather he wishes to explore the changing definition of utopia – initially cast as ‘impossible by definition’ – and with what he refers to as the ‘bridge’ between these two. This is a work of historiography.

The task of this work of historiography is achieved through two sections, the former considerably slimmer than the latter. Chapter i, ‘Europeans and religious orders in America’ and chapter ii, ‘The Society of Jesus – missionaries and missions’ are together around half the length of the remainder of the book. In the first chapter then, is the origin of the philosophy of the missions, their early development and the genesis of the tension between the civil and the ecclesiastical mission in the Americas. The Jesuits had to contain within themselves the need to address localised conditions and the neo-naifs to whom they brought the ‘Light’ and the universal mission and its place within universal monarchy (civil or ecclesiastical). The lineage of de Vitoria, Sepúlveda, Martin de Valencia, las Casas, Quiroga and Cabrera, combined with the conquistadores, resulting in a particular Jesuit vision of Acosta and Molina and in ‘accommodation’. In as much as the study is concerned with the ‘Jesuitification’ of the colonial (and indeed, the universal) mission, this is a welcome exposition, for although it is rather clearer in the case of the Jesuits – for the fullness of their record, their successful reach and the envy that they attracted – there remains considerable work to do, particularly in English, to disaggregate Hispanic imperial processes. So, Imbruglia recasts his two parts and the connection between them. This first is now a demonstration in which a Catholic vision of enlightenment (alumbradismo) was reawakened by the mission to the New World.

The second part is recast as ‘secularisation’. In another great irony, the wider the reach of the missions, the more people were brought face-to-face with the Christian message, and the more overtly appeared a sceptical or hostile reception. The ideas of elite intellectuals, taken to people more naïve or ignorant, may result in rejection, and the heirs of the ‘great men’ of chapter i were forced to be reactive, rather than didactic. This is the keystone of the Jesuit missions bridge. As we get to the other side we are presented with a second canon of ‘great men’: Toland, Locke, Pufendorf, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot. The enlightenment of alumbradismo has been replaced by the enlightenment of rationality.

This is an excellent and well-read piece of thinking, and an interesting approach to the longue durée of belief and practice. Here are two codicils and a quibble. The keystone chapter is perhaps made to bear too much weight to support the huge sweeps on either side of it, and in ranging across the spectrum of Christian, Catholic and secular thought in Europe and the Americas about utopias, the specificity of the Jesuits is obscured. In placing the weight of the redefinition of utopia and the (consequent, subsequent or coincidental) collapse of the Jesuit mission in the Americas to the time of European Enlightenment, we have a rather more traditional, linear, dare one say old-fashioned narrative of the decline of faith. And the quibble? Those familiar with Imbruglia's work may know what to expect, but the title of this study still left this reader wanting to know more about the specific Jesuit approach to utopia and the essence of mankind to be discovered through reducción. It is not the book that Imbruglia set out to write, but there is a fundamental philosophical tension within the term that is quite a bit more than ‘equivalent to doctrine, or mission’.