It is now over twenty years since Olwen Hufton posed the excellent question: ‘who paid for the Counter-Reformation?’ Although she declined to do more than sketch an answer in a trio of suggestive articles not many historians have subsequently attempted a more thoroughgoing and systematic response. A particular focus of interest, owing to the richness of their archives, however, has been the Society of Jesus, beginning with Dauril Alden's classic The making of an enterprise (Bloomington, In 1996), which memorably asked us to view the Jesuits as the first truly global corporation. Accordingly, they form the focus of all but three chapters of this collection. The editors of this worthwhile volume, which is equipped not only with a substantial introduction jointly written by the editors, but also with a thoughtful afterword by Županov alone as well as with five specially commissioned maps. provide the reader with a clear indication of what shape a satisfying answer to Hufton's question might take in the future. It begins with Vu Thanh's elegant preface that, following in the footsteps of Serge Gruzinski, argues that the missionary enterprise of early modern Catholicism cannot be considered apart from the ‘first globalisation’ ushered in by the Iberian empires subsequent to the ‘voyages of discovery’ and that ‘The routes of conversion used by the missionaries were none other than the trade routes linking Europe, the Americas and Asia’ (p. 3). However, Vu Thanh is careful to point out that the quest for souls and profits was not considered to be an either/or, zero-sum game. Just as the merchants were concerned with their own salvation, so were the missionaries acutely aware of the need to balance the need to fund their operations with their commitment to apostolic poverty. This tension was memorably captured by the emblem that the Jesuits included in that monument to the printers’ and engravers’ art which was the Imago primi saeculi (1640), commissioned by the Belgian province of the Society to mark its first centenary. Above the motto ‘Paupertas sapiens’ (Wise poverty) a ship is shown listing heavily in stormy seas. On board the crew is busily throwing merchandise overboard in order to lighten their load. In the chapters that follow, this contemporary awareness of the need to balance God and Mammon is never far from the surface. In their excellent introduction, the editors further develop their critique of the tendency, notwithstanding the famous quip attributed to Vasco da Gama's pilot, João Nunes, who on landing at Calicut, announced that his master was after both ‘Christians and spices’, to introduce a false dichotomy between commercial and spiritual motivation. Central to the editors’ mission is their insistence that missionaries be considered as ‘cross-cultural agents’ (emphasis added) who were never ‘mere instruments of colonial order’ (p. 17). Nor were they straightforward harbingers of capitalist rationality. Instead we should ask: ‘How did religious principles structure the missionaries’ business practices’ (p. 20)? The book is divided into four parts: ‘Missionaries as Traders’; ‘The Integration of Religious Orders into Global/Local Economic Actors’; ‘Funding the Missions’; and, finally, ‘Moralising the Economy’. Vu Thanh kicks off part i strongly with an insightful and nuanced chapter which examines the trading activities of the Society in Japan, where Alessandro Valignano, having been gifted the port settlement of Nagasaki by the local lord, turned it into a Hong Kong-style entrepôt by actively promoting the trade in Chinese silk in order to bankroll his ambitions to recruit and educate Japanese Christian converts to the Society. Here the missionaries were not only cultural but also financial intermediaries, who (in addition to income from trade and customs) lent money to both the Portuguese and their Japanese merchant counterparts. In a rather too descriptive and diffuse essay, Claudio Ferlan follows with an essay about how the native South American ‘tea’, Yerba Maté, moved from being simply a ritual drink used in native ceremonies to becoming commercialised by the Jesuits as an essential part of the economy of their reduction settlements in the province of Paraguay. Part ii consists of three particularly strong chapters. The first, by Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, considers the hitherto largely neglected dimension of the Jesuit mission to Japan: that of their proactive policy directed towards the ownership of land for the sake of more regular and dependable income than that from even the lucrative silk trade. Although the Jesuits had already been gifted Nagasaki, Ehalt focuses more on the process by which Japanese landlords gifted entire villages to the Jesuits. However, this made the latter vulnerable to such warlords as Hideyoshi whose ambitions for territorial consolidation under his direct control were incompatible with the continuance of this state of affairs. Christian Windler shifts attention to Safavid Persia where his focus is the Discalced Carmelites, who were first dispatched to Isfahan in 1604 at the behest of Pope Clement viii. Later they came under the jurisdiction of the Roman congregation (i.e. standing committee) of Propaganda Fide, rather than the royal patronage of the Iberian monarchies of Spain and Portugal. However, as Windler shows in his exhaustive analysis of the Carmelites’ account books, such was the exiguous nature of Roman support that the friars were forced back onto their own resources, which included renting out rooms to passing traders, irrespective of their nationality or religion, and even the sale of rose water. In this way such an underfunded mission integrated itself into local society: ‘Thus, missionaries became part of non-European centres where they rendered services to Asian princes, who saw Rome, not as the center of the world, but at best the center of a far-away European periphery’ (p. 146). Ryan Crewe shifts attention to another periphery, this time as far from Europe as it was possible to go: the Spanish-held Philippines, which was the setting for Iberian fantasies about the conversion of China to Christianity. Crewe identifies two complementary strategies deployed to this end: one outbound (which took a party of Franciscans to their grisly martyrdom in Nagasaki in 1597), and one inbound, which involved the Chinese community, that first the rhythm of the monsoon winds and then the logic of the market place ensured it became a major settlement of merchants and craftsmen (known as sangleyes – after ‘sing-li’, the Hokkien for ‘trade’ or ‘doing business’), who lived just outside the city walls of Manila. The numerous presence of the latter, who outnumbered the Spanish by at least 10:1, provoked periodic massacres of the Chinese. Crewe ends on a note that reminds us of the limit of missionary agency: the successful, small Dominican mission to Fujian was wholly due to the fact that local, Chinese Christians required the ministry of the mendicants to refound and rebuild a church that already existed through previous contact. In an important but sometimes unidiomatically translated contribution, Ariane Boltanski examines the financial support offered Jesuit colleges in France and Italy by noble patrons and emphasises how such patronage developed over time so that ‘the Society of Jesus became integrated in the circuits of local economies and became a major stakeholder of a broader financial network’ (p. 203). This entanglement meant, however, that the agency of both patron and beneficiary were constrained by mutual obligation and, sometimes, tensions. The degree to which the Jesuits became entangled in global as well as local trade networks can be seen in Sebastian Malaprade's intricate discussion of how the College of San Hermenegildo in Seville went bankrupt in 1645, owing some 450,000 ducats. The interest paid on loans the year before had cost 88,000 and the attempt to pay down this debt only made things worse as new loan arrangements were made ‘at usurious rates of interest’ (p. 228). What makes this story interesting is not so much the reputational damage inflicted on the Jesuits by their rivals and enemies, who on this occasion included the bishop of Puebla, Mexico, Juan de Palafox, author of a pamphlet denouncing the college for issuing bills of exchange and behaving ‘like a bank’ (p. 223), but the fact that the Jesuits had taken on the debt, initially at least, in response to a perfectly rational economic programme. This centred on a desire to improve the productivity of their lands and the export of some of their produce to the Indies. It also depended on the personal network of its financial managers – or procurators – which in the case of San Hemenegildo consisted of three brothers – Lorenzo, Juan and Andrés Villar. The location of the first in Veracruz, on the east coast of Mexico, meant that this particular network straddled the Atlantic. It was the Jesuits’ singular misfortune that in the late 1630s military expenses caused by France's intervention against Spain in the Thirty Years’ War determined the Spanish first minister Olivares to impose crippling tax demands on Seville merchants as well as counter-productive devaluations of the coinage and then the early 1640s witnessed a downturn in transatlantic trade – no shipment of silver from the New World reached Seville in 1640 – and the Catalan revolt began the same year. The final section of this collection consists of a well-matched pair of essays which address how the missionaries explained to themselves (and justified to others) their incessant quest for funding. In an exceptionally well written and finely argued essay, Tara Alberts focuses on the Paris-based Société des Missions Etrangères (MEP), which was founded in 1658 and consisted of secular clergy to challenge the Iberian-dominated orders of regular clergy in South-East Asia. Addressing themselves principally to their devout donors back in France, the MEP missionaries fashioned themselves in an image that corresponded closely to what Henri Brémond called the école française of spirituality centred on ‘abnegation of self ’ and ‘renunciation of the will’ (p. 259). Finally, Fabien Fechner takes us back to Paraguay to consider missionary economics from a particularly fruitful perspective, that of the records of the Provincial Congregations of the Jesuits. Unlike sources such as the Constitutions or General Congregations, such files display the degree to which pragmatism was king: ‘economic profit was tolerated when it was absolutely necessary to secure solid funding of a given enterprise’ (p. 38). Most controversially at least today, was the Society's employment of slaves (no fewer than 17,275 enslaved individuals of African origin worked on Jesuit farms in South America at the time of the suppression of the Society in Iberian territories in 1767). This sobering fact is testimony to the fact that, chameleonlike, the Jesuits were ultimately all too well integrated into local society, wherever they found themselves. Although this was not to save them from papal suppression in 1773.