Apostles of empire : the Jesuits and New France
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Apostles of empire : the Jesuits and New France
（France overseas : studies in empire and decolonization / series editors, Philip Boucher ... [et al.]）
University of Nebraska Press, c2019
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-312) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Winner of the 2020 Catholic Press Association Book Award in History
Apostles of Empire is a revisionist history of the French Jesuit mission to Indigenous North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a comprehensive view of a transatlantic enterprise with integral secular concerns. Between 1611 and 1764, 320 Jesuits were sent from France to North America to serve as missionaries. Most labored in colonial New France, a vast territory comprising eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region, inhabited by diverse Native American populations. Although committed to spreading Catholic doctrines and rituals and adapting them to diverse Indigenous cultures, these missionaries also devoted significant energy to more worldly concerns, particularly the transatlantic expansion of the absolutist-era Bourbon state and the importation of the culture of elite, urban French society.
In Apostles of Empire Bronwen McShea accounts for these secular dimensions of the mission's history through candid portraits of Jesuits engaged in a range of activities. We see them not only preaching and catechizing in terms borrowed from Indigenous idioms but also cultivating trade and military partnerships between the French and various Indian tribes. McShea shows how the Jesuits' robust conceptions of secular spheres of Christian action informed their efforts from both sides of the Atlantic to build up a French and Catholic empire in North America through Indigenous cooperation.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Note on Primary Sources
Part 1. Foundations and the Era of the Parisian Relations
1. A Mission for France
2. Rescuing the "Poor Miserable Savage"
3. Surviving the Beaver Wars and the Fronde
4. Exporting and Importing Catholic Charity
Part 2. A Longue Duree of War and Metropolitan Neglect
5. Crusading for Iroquois Country
6. Cultivating an Indigenous Colonial Aristocracy
7. Losing Paris
8. A Mission with No Empire
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"