ABSTRACT
In the early modern phase of human globalization, during the so-called era of Great Navigations, the Jesuits were pioneers both, in global connectivity and in global consciousness. Modern processes of globalization began historically with the discovery of the New World by Europeans, with the circumnavigation of the globe and with the ensuing Iberian global colonial expansion. Prior to the sixteenth century Western Europe had constituted a rather marginal and peripheral peninsula of such a system. The Jesuits were neither the only nor the first global missionaries. In fact, they followed literally in the steps of other older Catholic orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, etc., who had preceded them in colonial Spanish America as well as in Portuguese India. The Jesuits were not only the first Catholic teaching order but the first transnational professional organization of schoolmasters. The uncontested suppression of Jesuits in the second half of the eighteenth century would seem to indicate that their global practices were in fundamental tension.
