Reaping Souls and Yerba Maté. Franciscans and Jesuits as Economic Experts in Transatlantic Spaces of Entanglements (1535-1750)

• Applicant: Dr. Philip Knäble
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404385263

As a result of Max Weber's famous thesis concerning the connection between Protestantism and Capitalism, the Netherlands and England have become the most popular regions for research on early-modern economic history. This project focused instead on Catholic priests and lay brothers of the Franciscan and Jesuit Orders in the Spanish Empire and asks how they gained economic knowledge through related practices and proclaimed themselves to be experts in a specialized form of knowledge through their social interactions. The working thesis of this project is that early modern economic history cannot be properly described without taking into consideration the influence of Catholic clergymen, who had a great effect on contemporary semantics, institutions and practices of economy.This project investigates actors and practices in spaces of entanglement in the Atlantic world, most notably in Spain and its colonial cities and missions in the Jesuit and Franciscan provinces of "Paraguay," which today constitute Northern Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Southern Brazil, from the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 18th century. After the Spanish crown opened up the colonies to non-Spanish Jesuits in 1675, about 20% of the missionaries and lay brothers came from Germany and Austria; a shift that this project aims to explore by looking at their training and transnational activities until 1750. The final phase of the Jesuit mission, which came with the expulsion of the Jesuit Order in 1767, has been the subject of considerable scholarly research and will not be discussed. In order to proselytize local communities, or “reap souls,” the Franciscan and Jesuit Orders organized economically independent colleges and missions which they used to trade cattle, mules and yerba maté – the main ingredient for the staple local drink Mate tea – with the urban centers of the Andean region. The economic knowledge and practices of the priests and lay brothers of both Orders will be analyzed using a comparative perspective on three interrelated levels. First, both in Spain (“School of Salamanca”) and in Hispanic America the Orders produced pragmatic, practice-oriented “handbooks,” which contain discussions of economical problems using a form of economical semantics that would influence Adam Smith. Second, the global organization of the Orders required certain bureaucratic competences for which the orders continued to develop existing administrative and accounting techniques. And finally the members of the Orders agreed on their need to acquire manual and mercantile knowledge for which they recruited select members of their Orders from Europe, who had command over the sought after knowledge. This project is envisioned as part of a new cultural economic history, which contributes to sociopolitical discussions about the understanding of economics, especially the legitimization of economic experts, since the global financial crisis.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants