A Round Table on Luke Clossey’s Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions: (Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association, 2010)

The Wallace K. Ferguson Prize is awarded annually by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) to the best book in a field of history other than Canadian. In 2010, Luke Clossey, associate professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, joined a list of 30 superb scholars whose scholarship has received the Ferguson Prize since it was established in 1980. It is especially fitting that Clossey’s study, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions, returns us to a temporal period similar to that which distinguished Ferguson’s career. Clossey’s history of salvation, globalization, and early Jesuit missions in China, Germany, and Mexico is, as the CHA prize committee argued, an impressive, innovative, and ambitious study.¹ First published by Cambridge University Press in 2008, Clossey’s account of the personnel, monetary, relic, and information networks of missions in the seventeenth century masterfully demonstrates how global histories can also be social histories.

As part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in May 2012, a round table was convened by CHA to celebrate and reflect upon Clossey’s bold study. This session, held at the University of Waterloo, was chaired by Greta Kroeker (University of Waterloo) and featured commentaries by Brandon Marriott (St. Anne’s College, Oxford University), Karin Vélez (Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota), and Kenneth Mills (University of Toronto). The contributions to this round table retain their original oral character and collectively paint Clossey as an inspirational mentor, an insightful colleague, and a brave historian. Brandon Marriott frames his comments in relation to his own work on the seventeenth-century Jewish messiah Sabbatai Sevi, honing in on the perils, predicaments, and pleasures of conducting cross-religious, transnational, global histories. Karin Vélez takes us into her 2009 graduate seminar at Northeastern University, enabling us to observe how future historians conceived of and debated – we are told there was table pounding – the importance of Clossey’s work. Kenneth Mills outlines seven reasons why Clossey’s study is admirable and encouraging, reasons that range from Clossey’s courage and breadth to his reflections upon Jesuit self-authorization, promotion, and diffusion. Luke Clossey graciously participated in this session designed to celebrate and bring attention to his insightful scholarship.

We at Histoire sociale / Social History would like to thank each of our contributors for agreeing to share their responses to this groundbreaking study and hope that you enjoy this exciting and engaging exchange.

Brandon Marriott, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University

Luke Clossey’s Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions received the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize for being an “outstanding scholarly book” in a field of history other than Canadian history. But Salvation and Globalization is not completely without mention of the country that Clossey now calls home. To the early modern Jesuit missionaries who are the main historical figures of Clossey’s book, we are the “Savages of Canada” (p. 241). The Jesuit Julien Maunoir once described his mission field on Ouessant Island off the coast of Brittany as so remote from Christianity and all civilization as to be positively “Canadian” (p. 233).

The selection committee for the Ferguson Prize was impressed with three aspects of Clossey’s “highly readable and engaging book.” First, his bold vision: producing the first global study of the early Jesuits. Second, his innovative method: examining the trans-regional connections between China, Germany, and Mexico, three places rarely studied together. Third, his “extensive and intensive linguistic and archival work”: Clossey discusses no fewer than 53 different Jesuit missionaries who were active in at least two of the three countries that frame this study. As the prize committee correctly notes, this adds “biographical depth to the book’s global breadth.”

One word in particular strikes me repeatedly in Clossey’s text and in reviews of it. This word, found in part in the title, is global. This book, the selection committee reminded us, is the “first truly global study of the Society...