The Making of an Enterprise: The Jesuits in Portugal, Its Empire and Beyond, 1540-1750 (review)

Dauril Alden of the University of Washington, author of Royal Government in Colonial Brazil (California, 1968), is one of the most senior colonial Brazilian historians currently active in the United States. In his long-awaited Making of an Enterprise, Alden presents his findings from over twenty years of research on the Jesuits as they operated in the early modern Portuguese world.

In this, the first of his planned two volumes, Alden examines the Jesuit Portuguese Assistancy, "a vast complex of administrative units that included the kingdom of Portugal and its empire, portions of the Indian subcontinent, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and certain lesser territories" (p. viii). The Making of an Enterprise concentrates on the establishment of the order in the 1540s and its operations in the Portuguese world to 1750. Alden's questions, which frame the material, center on the personnel and the global financing of the order, as well as on Jesuit relations with the local and imperial Portuguese political structures in which it operated. After three introductory chapters on the founding of the order and the creation of the Portuguese empire, Alden provides six chapters constituting a global view of Jesuit activities. In the following three chapters, he focuses on exactly who these people were, where they originated, and how long they served. He then turns to the heart of the volume: ten chapters on the Jesuits' global finances. He concludes with an additional three chapters that set the stage for volume 2, "The Destruction of an Enterprise." The text is supplemented with six appendices, numerous tables, seven helpful maps, and illustrations of Jesuit properties.

Obviously, this is a massive work, and the reviewer is placed in the somewhat awkward position of examining only the first half of a sweeping undertaking. Nevertheless, certain trends are clearly evident. Alden has given us great depth on the issues he pursues. In particular, the data on personnel and financing are thoroughly convincing. He has created what will undoubtedly be the fundamental reference on the Jesuit order in the Portuguese world. Each of the twenty-five chapters reads as a nearly independent essay, with a brief introduction and conclusion. Almost every chapter has a table or two (some have many more) that summarizes much of the data. In spite of this organization, the work is very dense, and readers may be overwhelmed by the quantity of detail. Alden's prose is at times peculiar. For example, many of the people in this work do not die, they expire. Other words occasionally employed do little to aid the reader, such as lustrum (p. 337) and quinquennium (p. 384) in lieu of half a decade or simply five years. At times this vocabulary is on less stable ground (at least in this reviewer's opinion) when Alden uses Philippine as an adjective to indicate the reigns of any of the three kings named Philip of the Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580-1640) or Petrine to refer to King Pedro II. To take another example, is a bondsman the same as a slave?

One inexplicable omission is the lack of a bibliography. Given the projected audience of academics, Alden needs to clearly state exactly where he worked, when, for how long, and which documents he consulted. In addition, he should list his printed primary and secondary sources. Leaving all this in footnotes alone is not a satisfactory solution, nor is the commentary provided in the bibliographical note. The bibliographical commentary in this volume may, in fact, be only a temporary solution; perhaps Alden is planning an extended bibliography at the end of the second volume. That would certainly be a welcome addition.

The main strength of this work is its global vision, and for that Alden is to be congratulated. He clearly understands that...