Entangled in the Global Networks of Macau: Jesuit Procurators in the Seventeenth Century

Procurators in Jesuit HistoriographyThe Jesuit missions would have been unable to survive on a global scale without the work of the procurators, who were responsible for all the order's material, monetary, and logistical operations.Yet little of the research in the ever-expanding field of Jesuit studies has been devoted to this office.The first contributions, on the missions of Brazil and Maranhão, came from the pioneering work of Serafim Leite, S.J. (1890-1969), with subsequent authors also focusing on those missions.As a result, we know more about the role of the procurators within the Spanish assistancy than in the East Asian missions, established in Macau and Nagasaki, which have received only scant attention.Although very few sources have been published, and there are still no monographs on the eastern missions, 2 João Paulo Oliveira e Costa's doctoral thesis, which uses the episcopacy of Luís de Cerqueira (1552-1614) to explore the networks where the procurators operated, made a major addition to research on the procurators in Japan.3 Francisco Figueira Faria, Daniele Frison, and Mihoko Oka subsequently published three further essays on the topic that also prioritized the Japanese territory, discussing the role of three Jesuits as procurators of the Japanese province: the well-known inter-1.This article is the outcome of the paper "Entangled in the Global Networks of Macau: Jesuit Procurators and Their Business in the Seventeenth Century" presented in Brotéria (Lisbon) at the international symposium on Jesuit studies "Circa missiones: Jesuit Understandings of Mission through the Centuries" (June 2023).I would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies for the opportunity as well as all the professors and colleagues I have met for their interest, support, and suggestions.Leonor Pratas is a PhD student in modern history at NOVA University of Lisbon, School of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH-UNL).She has a bachelor's degree in history (2021) and completed her master's at the same institution with a dissertation entitled "The Jesuit Procure/Procuratura of Macau: A Global Agency during the Ming-Qing Transition (1620-1680)" ( 2024) on which this work is based.She is currently a PhD fellow at the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, in collaboration with Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre, IP (FCT-CCCM) (reference PRT/BD/154858/2023/