McNeil Seminar: Andrew Dial "Spiritual Bankruptcy: The Collapse of the Jesuits' Martinique Mission"

Friday, February 23, 2018

3:00 PM-6:00 PM

Andrew Dial, McGill University, 2017-2018 Barra Dissertation Fellow and Carpenter Fellow in Early American Religious Studies

A straw poll taken during last year's McNeil Center May event found that if one mentions the Jesuits to an Early Americanist their mind will immediately go to New France. The Jesuits' role as missionary-ethnographers (and, more recently, botanists and linguists) among the peoples of the St. Lawrence watershed have dominated the Society of Jesus' profile in both Early American studies and French Atlantic historiography due to the preponderance of the Jesuit Relations as a source base.

The Jesuits in the paper you are about to read are not ethnographers. Or botanists. Or linguists. They did not live amid the leafy forests of New France but beneath Martinique's sun-soaked palm fronds. They were merchants, plantation managers, and slave owners. They chartered ships, wrote bills of exchange, and oversaw enslaved labor. They led active sex lives.

This paper reorients the scholarship of Jesuits in the French Atlantic from New France to the Caribbean and changes their role from ethnographers to economic actors. It centers on the head of the Martinique mission Fr. Antione Lavalette, who is infamous in the Society of Jesus for causing the Jesuit's 1764 expulsion from France and its colonies. In the decade before the Seven Years' War, Lavalette built a transatlantic currency exchange network which British privateers cut off upon the outbreak of hostilities. His creditors in France sued the Society to recoup their funds. This paper describes what happened next.

For a copy of this paper, please contact us or stop by the Department of History in MacAlister 3025.

This 3 p.m. lecture will be followed by a reception at 5 p.m.

This McNeil seminar is sponsored by Drexel University's Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships.

Contact Information

Gabriel Rocha
gar56@drexel.edu