Edited by the leading scholar in the field, this volume is a collection of fourteen essays divided into five uneven parts: “The Americas,” “Africa,” “Islamic World,” “Asia,” and “The Structures.” As Hsia articulates it in his introduction, the central question of the volume is: “Was Catholic evangelization a part of European colonial and imperial expansion or was it carried through on a different institutional impetus with different goals from conquest, subjugation, and incorporation?” (2). To show the complexities of answering this question, Hsia brings up the contrasting example of two Catholic missionaries: the Franciscan Diego de Landa (d. 1579), who wrote Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (first ethnography of the Mayan people), and the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (d. 1610), who made of Chinese Confucianism a bridge toward Christianity. While Ricci's exploration of native culture led to his admiration of it, Landa's led to abhorrence (2).

Of course, this dichotomy of methods did not simply differentiate various religious orders engaged in the missionary enterprises but reflected the divisions within the religious communities themselves and the role the missionaries’ national background had played. It is no accident that Ricci was born in the Italian Peninsula and therefore did not directly represent interests of the European colonial powers present in Asia. Moreover, Europeans’ general admiration for the Chinese (and Japanese) cultures impacted their choices of missionary strategies, although it must be underscored that not all missionaries in Japan or China were as accommodating and that their accommodation was a strategy that highlighted positively some aspects of the cultures they encountered while disparaging others, as in the case of Ricci caricaturing the Buddhist traditions (9).

Ricci's example also shows why the Society of Jesus remains the main subject of scholarly interest when exploring the Catholic global missionary enterprise. The Jesuits were the first transnational missionary order and its centralized organization differed notably from other older and new religious orders. This structure established an efficient network of systematic letter-writing, which resulted in unrivaled collection of documents, many of which have been preserved in the archives and published since the end of the nineteenth century (5–6), when the Jesuits embraced Leopold von Ranke's importance of primary sources in building historical narrative. Unsurprisingly, then, almost all essays in Hsia's collection deal with the Jesuit missions. While most of them reflect the authors’ previous research already known in the scholarly community, there are some that indicate new approaches in the field, like Fred Vermote's analysis of the missions’ finances (367–400) and the gender prism that is employed by Deslanders (40–46) and Starthern (166–68)

No volume can encompass all aspects of early modern Catholic global missions, and the editor of this collection is fully aware of it (13). But while Hsia's volume was being prepared for publication, a couple of other collections to fill the lacunae he mentions have appeared from the same publisher, including Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia, and the Americas, edited by Raphaël Garrod and Jasmin Haskell; Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Robert A. Maryks, and Hsia himself; and Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Africa, edited by Maryks and Festo Mkenda, SJ.

While all this recent intense production provides us with a more and more nuanced and intriguing picture of Catholic global missions from the perspective of the missionaries themselves and the colonial powers they represented or not, we are still in dire need of hearing the voices of the other actors of this enterprise that changed the early modern world so dramatically—the indigenous peoples.