Introduction: Jesuits in Asian-Pacific borderlands

Abstract

In the last years, a growing number of scholars of world history have focused on Jesuit networks, economic and cultural interactions in the Asian-Pacific territories. This introduction and the essays contained within the pages of this special issue bring religious mobility to the foreground, putting special emphasis on the way how “conversion” (both religious and cultural) transformed the trans-Pacific frontier into a zone of sustained contact and transculturation involving Europe, Asia, and the Americas. First, it explores contending networks of evangelization, which revolve around a basic premise: they were heterogeneous and uncoordinated, moving in unexpected and complex directions. Second, it analyzes the way in which Jesuit evangelization effected a “tricultural convergence” of Asian, Iberian, and indigenous cultures towards the production of a “global consciousness.” Finally, it examines a meta-history of Iberian globalization and empire, which emphasized a failed hegemony over Islamic territories of southern Philippines as much as diminished the native Filipino as historical subject.