The papers in this panel focus on the history of various Catholic missionary organizations in the Americas, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Mission work demanded adaptation to new social and environmental contexts, a circumstance in which missionaries both imposed their own intellectual assumptions on diverse societies and landscapes and also developed new, hybrid forms of scientific knowledge and practice. The work also brought missionaries into close and ongoing contact with Indigenous communities and enslaved people, for whom the priests were at times allies and at other times enslavers, a reflection of the nuances of Catholicism’s lengthy entanglement with European colonialism. As spaces of encounter, conflict, and cooperation, rural missions offer valuable case studies in the development and transmission of natural knowledge between different intellectual communities. The papers illustrate the opportunities presented by missionary archives to develop richer understandings of Indigenous and enslaved engagement with European systems of power, faith and scientific knowledge.

The temporal and geographic breadth of the papers in this panel illuminate change over time in the various relationships between missionaries, colonized societies, and imperial authorities. While each paper underscores the centrality of Catholic missionary work to colonial histories, they also emphasize the distinct projects of missionary communities, which shaped the nature of their relationship to central authorities. As landholders in colonial economies, missionary groups sometimes participated in extractive or exploitative relations with subject populations and environments. At other times, their independent social and economic power enabled missionaries and the Church to differ or even clash with state officials and broader colonial projects.

This panel, placing missionaries at the center of histories of health, agriculture, labor, enslavement, and colonial expansion, demonstrates the vast terrain of archival opportunity in this area of research. It reflects the growing engagement of our intellectual community–and of the Catholic Church— with the global environmental history of the Church’s clergy and its institutions.