Catholic Missions in the Early Modern World

This book-project, tentatively entitled 'Global Catholic Missions and the Expansion of Europe, 1500-1800', will analyze the relationship between the maritime and colonial expansion of western Europe and Catholic missions to the non-European world. Furthermore, it will explore the themes of political power and religious conversion, cultural translation and representation, and will attempt to present an argument about the formation of an early modern global epistemology and exchange system, in which religion occupies the central role of definition, before the dismantling of this system in the late 18th century by a new global system of commerce and epistemology determined by other paradigms.