Science, Empire, and the Old Society of Jesus, 1540–1773

Since their foundation in 1540, and well after their first suppression by pope Clement XIV in 1773, Jesuits were key actors in the intertwined goals of the competing Catholic empires: colonization and evangelization. Both goals implied a momentous effort in collecting, producing, and transmitting knowledge to which the Jesuits contributed in several regions of the globe.
The peculiar place of Jesuits in the historiography of early modern science and empire has been established for more than a century, as scholarly interest in Jesuit science has been fuelled by the Society itself for a very long time; it has recently grown into a full-fledged research subfield.
This chapter seeks to revisit the place of Jesuit in making science in the early modern world contexts by adopting a tentative situational approach; that is, by looking at Jesuits within intra- and trans-imperial configurations and interconnected structures of governance. Such an approach helps avoid the pitfalls of treating science, empire, and the Jesuits as obvious and unitary entities straightforwardly conjoined with one another, as is still common in both the history of science and global history.
The chapter will first examine the role of Jesuits as imperial agents and science as an appendage to imperialism, mostly in the Americas, and secondly, it will question the function and impact of Jesuit science in Asia. By highlighting a few underlying ambivalences in the historiography on Jesuit science in imperial contexts and scrutinizing the heuristic value of “science and empire” in relation to the Jesuits’ project and its implementation, it aims at contributing to the current scholarly effort towards a better situated understanding of both science-making and empire-making in the early modern world.