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

由于马克斯·韦伯关于新教与资本主义之间关系的著名论断，荷兰和英格兰成为近代经济史研究最热门的地区。相反，该项目关注的是西班牙帝国方济各会和耶稣会的天主教牧师和世俗兄弟，并询问他们如何通过相关实践获得经济知识，并通过社会互动宣布自己是一种专门形式的知识专家。这个项目的工作主题是，如果不考虑天主教神职人员的影响，就不能正确地描述早期现代经济史，他们对当代的语义学、制度和经济实践产生了巨大的影响。本项目研究大西洋世界纠缠空间中的行为者和实践，最著名的是西班牙及其殖民城市和“巴拉圭”的耶稣会和方济各会省的传教，从16世纪中叶到18世纪中叶，这些省今天组成了阿根廷北部、巴拉圭、乌拉圭和巴西南部。在1675年西班牙王室向非西班牙耶稣会开放殖民地后，大约20%的传教士和世俗兄弟来自德国和奥地利；这个项目旨在通过观察他们的培训和跨国活动来探索这一转变，直到1750年。耶稣会传教的最后阶段是随着1767年耶稣会被驱逐而来的，一直是相当多的学术研究的主题，不会被讨论。为了使当地社区改宗，或“收获灵魂”，方济各会和耶稣会组织了经济独立的学院和传教团，他们用这些学院和传教团与安第斯地区的城市中心交换牛、骡子和Yerba Maté-当地主要饮料Mate茶的主要成分。我们将从三个相互关联的层面上用比较的视角来分析这两个教派的牧师和世俗弟兄的经济知识和实践。首先，无论是在西班牙(“萨拉曼卡学派”)还是在拉美裔美国，修道会都制作了务实的、以实践为导向的“手册”，其中包含使用一种会影响亚当·斯密的经济语义学的形式来讨论经济问题。其次，订单的全球组织需要某些官僚能力，而订单继续为此而发展现有的行政和会计技术。最后，订单的成员同意他们需要获得手工和商业知识，为此他们从欧洲招募了精选的订单成员，这些成员掌握着所需的知识。这个项目被设想为新的文化经济史的一部分，这有助于自全球金融危机以来关于对经济学的理解的社会政治讨论，特别是经济专家的合法化。

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.