This volume forms part of a series which complements the Journal of Jesuit Studies, the Jesuit Studies book series and Jesuit Historiography online (JHO), all of which are Open Access publications overseen by the tirelessly enterprising Robert Aleksander Maryks, based now at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań. The story of the Jesuits and their interactions with Muslim powers in this part of the world is difficult to recount as a coherent story. This is because of the larger context in which the attempts by Spanish and Portuguese soldiers, sailors, merchants and missionaries to replicate their eventually successful policy of ‘reconquista’ in Europe led in the Asian-Pacific to serial misunderstanding and mostly unheroic failure (in Hormuz and Mughal India) and to incomplete conquest peppered with frequent setbacks (in the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos). What is striking is how the attempts to replicate Old World zero tolerance of Islam in both these areas remains remarkably free of the accommodationist strategies made famous by the would-be Jesuit Brahmin Roberto de Nobili or by the adoptive Chinese literatus Matteo Ricci sj. Instead, from the relentlessly aggressive (and correspondingly unsucessful) policy adopted by Gasper Berze in mid sixteenth-century Hormuz to the so-called ‘Moro Wars’ with the Sulu, Maguindanao and Brunei sultanates, which created several Jesuit martyrs as well as not that many converts, the story is one of conflict and confusion. The only exception to this was the experience of the Jesuit missions to the Mughal Emperors Akbar and his son Jahangir, for both of whom the Jesuit missionaries served an important diplomatic role as go-betweens with the Portuguese ‘Estado da India’. However, even here, Jesuit hopes that they had found a Mughal Constantine were dashed when they came up against the brutal reality of the Portuguese desire to exercise a monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean and the inevitable Mughal response. The authors tell their stories with authority, drawing on considerable knowledge of the relevant sources both primary and secondary (which are helpfully listed in a comprehensive, consolidated bibliography). However, the volume suffers from the lack of any maps as well as of the careful eye of a native English speaker to proof-read the text, which particularly in the sections on Indonesia and the Philippines contains numerous unidiomatically expressed sentences, which make the reading heavy going at times. Nevertheless, the volume is to be welcomed for providing a usefully up-to-date introduction to a topic which has been under-represented in the literature. Furthermore, in conjunction with another volume in the same series – Jesuits & Islam in Europe, co-written by Emanuele Colombo and the late Paul Shore, also published in 2023 – we now have a geographically comprehensive treatment of a theme whose importance was recognised long ago by the Saudi-born anthropologist Talal Asad when he wrote: ‘Europe did not simply expand overseas; it made itself through that expansion.’
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