This chapter introduces in detail the comparability of three early modern states: Tudor and early Stuart England between 1533 and 1640, Tokugawa Japan between 1640 and 1853, and Qing China between 1684 and 1840. Each episode examines governance during a period of relative domestic peace after the state had consolidated its power and established an administrative structure. The early modern state as an impersonal governing apparatus over delimited territory is common to these three cases. Likewise, a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation linked to concrete performance in domestic governance is found in all three states, despite their respective differences in territorial scale, political institutions, and international circumstances. Although each state had a different fiscal basis, state fiscal capacity remained highly limited. Given this constraint, state–society collaboration was key to attaining good domestic governance; and the norm of state responsibility for the public interest facilitated such collaboration to the benefit of both state and society. The chapter discusses under what conditions such state–society cooperation failed, showing the limits to the resilience of the early modern state.

The North Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century was an oceanic borderland zone shaped by whaling and other extractive industries, and characterised by the rapid circulation of animals, people, commodities and capital. It was also a thoroughly imperial space: while Japanese, Pacific Islanders and white ‘beachcombers’ all worked aboard whalers, only the latter could leverage their citizenship to secure extraterritorial protection from imperial powers.

The history of the Bonin (J: Ogasawara) Islands illustrates this well. Until 1830 the islands had only the most fleeting history of human habitation, yet by 1863 they had emerged as a vital provisioning hub for the whaling fleet, populated by Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Anglo beachcombers. When the Tokugawa government began colonising the islands, the beachcombers pointedly refused to naturalise as Japanese citizens, and secured diplomatic backing from their respective consulates in Tokyo. In doing so they frustrated Japanese attempts to assert territorial sovereignty over the Bonins for a generation.

In the late-sixteenth century, a spate of violent incidents brought disrepute upon the mission enterprise in New Spain.Spanish churchmen lamented that some of their peers were inciting natives to disobey, resist, and even burn the churches of their ecclesiastical rivals.Spaniards spilled much ink in reporting these unseemly clashes in their correspondence and chronicles.Less reported are the many similar confrontations that occurred simultaneously in indigenous communities.Such was the worldly power of the mission enterprise that those Spanish churchmen and native rulers who did not have access to it jostled, often violently, to possess it.This chapter situates these curious episodes in the broader context of a series of political crises that shook the mendicant-indigenous mission enterprise to its very foundations in the 1570s and 1580s.It examines the politics of secularization, conflicts among indigenous jurisdictions for control of the mission Church, and the many points of cross-influence between Spanish and indigenous rivalries.As a result this chapter finds a mission enterprise that began to decline not solely due to Spanish political changes that undercut mendicant power, but rather because this weakening of mendicant power in the Spanish realm interacted with the on-going fragmentation and atomization of indigenous polities.

The epilogue to “The Mexican Mission” takes a step back from the great edifice of the mission enterprise and situates it in its global context. It traces the ways in which observers around the globe interpreted the Mexican mission enterprise. The Mexican mission profoundly influenced the fledgling mission enterprise in the Philippines, where veterans of Mexico and the New World sought to capitalize on the lessons that Mexico could have on their influence. Similarly, this mission experience shaped Spanish expectations for domestic Morisco in Iberia.As the most widespread overseas mission program in the Spanish Empire, the Mexican mission represented a mission model whereby temporal power could produce rapid and dramatic results. Yet this very characteristic of the mission enterprise was reduced to caricature by detractors and opponents. In Japan, Buddhist monks warned that Spanish-style missions posed grave dangers to Japanese sovereignty, mentioning New Spain specifically.In Protestant Europe and Puritan North America, meanwhile, detractors pointed to Mexico as proof that Spanish missions had more to do with temporal power than spiritual inspiration.Such stereotypes undoubtedly served their authors’ interests, but also contained a grain of truth, as demonstrated in this book: for natives and Spaniards alike, the mission functioned as means of raising a new polity and new world during Mexico’s century of death.