Introduction: Accounting Practices in Missionary Territories (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

This article situates the contributions to the special issue in the context of the history of missionary economies and accounting practices. Instead of focusing on economic efficiency, new approaches in accounting history have been considering other dimensions, such as the disciplinary potential of accounting and its use as an instrument for enacting specific forms of governance. The article then presents the normative frameworks of Catholic missionary economies, which were defined both by the religious orders and the Roman Curia. The fragmentation of the surviving accounting documentation reflects the composite and layered structures of early modern global Catholicism. The article finally shows that mission financing depended on the interactions in the globalising contexts of the early modern period. The missionaries and their principals used global trade and financial networks, often in cooperation with non-European actors, while the missionaries simultaneously adapted to local economic conditions.