This book began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley; the book's title surely suggests an unusually large topic for a Ph.D. thesis. In fact the topic is considerably narrower than the title indicates, and this study focuses on Jesuit missions in China and Mexico, their links with each other, and their links with Germany in the seventeenth century. Responding to a historiography that has emphasized the vertical structure of the Society of Jesus, under a superior general and the pope in Rome, Clossey investigates a horizontal global network of Jesuits and Jesuit work in three very different parts of the world.

Communication and transportation were, by twenty-first century standards, incredibly slow and unreliable in the 1600s. Clossey highlights two somewhat contradictory outcomes of this situation for Jesuit missionaries. On the one hand, the “decentralizing nature of distance” (56) meant that Rome could not easily supervise or direct what Jesuits did in the Americas or in Asia. An exchange of letters could take years, if the letters arrived at all, and thus local initiatives could not and did not always wait for Roman directives. On the other hand, the abundance of letters that is extant provides a rich window onto what Jesuits did, and what they thought about what they did. Clossey's main sources are the letters of fifty-three Jesuits who traveled between Germany and China and/or Mexico. By “Germany,” Clossey means the Holy Roman Empire, more or less, and by “German” Jesuits he means those belonging to the German Assistancy, a grouping of Jesuit provinces that in the seventeenth century included an Austrian and a Bohemian province in addition to three provinces covering territory corresponding roughly to what we now call Germany. Clossey points out that German princes, bishops, and other benefactors were key to the financing of the Jesuits in China, though in theory, at least, the Portuguese monarch was committed to supporting them.

Dynastic and ethnic rivalries abounded in Europe, and these traveled with Portuguese, Spanish, and other colonizers as they traveled to Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere. Indeed, such rivalries helped motivate European exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world. But Clossey points out that the members of a Jesuit province were often diverse in their nationalities and places of birth; the international vocation of Jesuits was frequently in tension with the national agendas of monarchs and the xenophobia that such agendas encouraged. Though Jesuits at times found their approaches to evangelization in tension with papal perspectives or directives, the Society of Jesus also received help from some popes in overcoming royal reluctance to admit foreign Jesuits. Clossey does an excellent job of exploring the motives of Jesuit missionaries, motives that included zeal for the Christianization of the world, perhaps at the price of martyrdom, but also motives that were less heroic, such as wanderlust, interest in the exotic, and mere sightseeing.

That other Catholic missionaries could be the biggest obstacle to Jesuit success in spreading the gospel is clear from Clossey's presentation. For example, he points out that a Franciscan missionary in Mexico thought it suitable to instruct the native population on the meaning of hell by burning alive their dogs and cats. It is not difficult to imagine how such cruelty and violence would have alienated anyone from Christian teachings, making any further apologetics useless.

This reviewer found but one set of factual errors in this otherwise meticulous study. Clossey states that Jesuit novices became “formed scholastics” when they took vows at the end of the novitiate; he also suggests that these men became “spiritual coadjutors” sometime prior to becoming “professed” fathers (27–28). A more accurate account of Jesuit formation would be this: a novice who took vows became an “approved scholastic,” and he then undertook the studies and work necessary for ordination to priesthood. Sometime after ordination, and when he had completed tertianship (a kind of third year of novitiate), he was considered fully formed. He could then be called either to the “grade” of spiritual coadjutor, with the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or to the “grade” of professed father, in which case he also took a fourth vow regarding availability to be missioned, by the pope, anywhere in the world.

Clossey insists that the principal mission of Jesuits concerned salvation, for their own souls, and the souls of those to whom they were sent. Reacting against anachronistic interpretations of Jesuit history that would play down efforts to convert peoples to Catholic Christianity, he asserts in his conclusion the “centrality of soteriology in early-modern Catholicism” (245). He states that every decree of the Council of Trent dealt with “the salvation of souls” (248), even if Trent did not issue a decree on missions. Clossey proposes the rather awkward term Global Salvific Catholicism as more specific and more accurate than Early Modern Catholicism, a terminology that has been advanced by John O'Malley. Seeing a focus on salvation as continuous with late medieval religion, Clossey cautions against application of the adjective “modern” to Catholicism—whether the Jesuit version or otherwise—circa 1500–1800. But Clossey gives too little attention to how Jesuits understood and explained salvation. Was salvation necessarily a premodern concept? The Jesuit founder, Ignatius of Loyola, believed that God could be found in all things. Where did Jesuit missionaries find God, and where did they encourage others to find God?

Jesuit history has been a hot topic in recent decades, especially for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This book makes a significant contribution to a growing understanding of the history not only of the Society of Jesus, but of Catholicism after Trent, of European cultural and political history, and of the complexity of cultural encounters between Europeans and others.