Thinking with the Spanish Empire: The Religious Orders and World Evangelization

ABSTRACT This article argues that in order to achieve a fuller and more accurate understanding of the history of the early modern Spanish world, we need to study the Spanish Empire as an integrated and coherent unit of analysis, instead of separating it into nation-state fragments or simply placing it in the background of our studies. It was an empire that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was not only European and American but also African and Asian, especially during the period of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns between 1580 and 1640. An imperial mindset, great mobility, and a global perspective characterized the lives and mentalities of many inhabitants of the empire. This was especially evident in the case of the religious orders, which played a fundamental role in the history of the Spanish Empire. Many of their members, both male and female, thought and acted within a worldwide framework, not only because they saw the conversion of all the peoples of the world to Catholicism as their inescapable, pressing task, but also because they inhabited a polity whose mental horizons were equally global in scope.