Familiar to anyone with even a casual understanding of the seventeenth-century Jesuit mission to New France are the prevailing notions of the missionaries as diligent harvesters of souls, proto-ethnographers, or would-be martyrs yearning for a holy death at the hands of indigenous groups hostile to the faith. In this fine new book, Bronwen McShea tells a different story, that of the Jesuits’ role as “enthusiastic, enterprising empire builders for the Bourbon State” (xvi) from the earliest decades of the 1600s through the following century.

The book is divided into two parts, consisting of four chapters each. Part 1, “Foundations and the Era of the Parisian Relations,” focuses on the decades in which the missionaries’ famous reports of their activities were published annually in France. McShea traces how the Jesuits on the ground in New France collaborated with French political authorities and commercial powers to further the cause of empire. Their connections to indigenous groups proved useful in cementing trading and political ties with French partners. And their partnerships with French elites led to the importation to New France of Old World charitable ministries and medical services, French ideas of civility, and military practices to create secure and productive trading networks. Part 2, “A Long Durée of War and Metropolitan Neglect,” traces the mission's history after it had begun to pass from fashion in France, and as factors like the cessation of the publication of the Relations and shifting priorities among lay and Jesuit authorities forced supporters of the New France mission to scale back their dreams of a French Catholic empire.

Along the way, McShea tells aspects of the story of the Jesuit mission in more detail than I have seen anywhere else. We learn, for example, the extent to which the Parisian publisher of the Relations, Sébastien Cramoisy, was deeply entangled in the mission and its metropolitan fortunes. And former mission superior Paul Le Jeune's stint as procurer for the mission in Paris is also explained here in a new light. A particular strength of the book is that McShea tells the story of the mission through its end, rather than limiting herself to its earliest years, as many have done.

Another strength, in my view, is McShea's careful attention to language. At various points in the book, she zeroes in on revealing vocabulary choices in the Jesuits’ writing to show how their descriptions of indigenous life contributed to the case they were building for empire. Chapter 2 is particularly good in this regard. The author is also to be commended for her occasional use of unpublished and archival materials to paint a rich picture of the mission, materials that arguably have been overshadowed by the Relations and are only just beginning to receive the attention they deserve. As McShea's analysis suggests, there is much to learn from the letters, draft reports, journals, and other missionary writings that were never intended for publication.

I find very little to criticize in this book, although McShea is probably right that “a book on the mission's French imperial history may strike some readers . . . as regressively Eurocentric” (xxii). She justifies her choice of focus as a corrective to decades of scholarship that have foregrounded indigenous responses to Christianity and the manner in which those responses shaped the mission, at the expense of accounting for its relationship to European political and economic forces and intellectual concerns. This is a fair point, but it also strikes me that a study of the mission's relationship to empire that also attends to the experiences and points of view of those on the receiving end might have been a very timely and important achievement. Still, McShea's results in her chosen task are outstanding. This is a deeply researched, well-written, and convincing reexamination of the Jesuit mission to New France, sure to find interested readers in a variety of fields.