This sixth work by Millé celebrates the bicentenary of the Jesuits’ expulsion from Spanish America. Unfortunately, like certain other carefully researched works, it may turn out to be occasionally consulted but seldom read. If so, the author may blame his method rather than his style. Millé writes well when he chooses to synthesize an event such as the crisis in the Jesuit missions that occurred from 1750 to 1768; surely he deserved the history prize which Buenos Aires awarded him in 1952. In this book, however, he reconstructs the work of the Jesuits by chronicling all pertinent events from the arrival of the Jesuits in Spanish South America to their expulsion. His purpose is to set the record straight by providing a full and accurate account. For this, he relies on the works of Pablo Pastells, Francisco Mateos, and Guillermo Furlong, and supplements these by printed documents and manuscripts, the latter mainly from the Archivo General de Indias.

The result is commendable, subject to certain limitations. His record of Jesuit history includes such matters as the arrivals and departures of missionaries, the establishment of colegios and churches, the holding of provincial meetings, and the struggle with pestilence, famine, and encomenderos. All these matters, as well as dates, names, and vital data, are fully and accurately recorded. He also details the Jesuit efforts to remove Indians from control of the encomenderos, the myth of Jesuit mines in the Seven Missions area, and the friendly relations of Jesuits with British agents of the South Sea Company. The reader may draw upon these recorded facts with confidence. Millé has limited his chronology, however, in a way not indicated in the title. Peru is not covered much beyond the sixteenth century; Tucumán is rarely touched upon after 1650; and even Paraguay receives less attention than Buenos Aires.

Millé apparently intended to refute Jesuit critics by a documented factual chronicle of Jesuit labors in the Río de la Plata. In writing about the Treaty of Madrid of 1750, however, and the uprooting of Indians from the east bank of the Uruguay, he abandons his chronicling and resorts to historical narrative. Although his account is clear and detailed, I doubt whether he has done much more than to state his faith in the practical and eternal value of Jesuit work among the Indians. Like others of similar views, he deplores the destruction of the missions and the expulsion of the Jesuits by a seemingly callous and irreligious monarch, and he rues the Indians’ descent into barbarism—helpless sheep without their pastors. What this view fails to take into account is that, in the eighteenth century at least, the Company of Jesus did not adhere to a uniform philosophy regarding human nature and its possibilities. As Antonio de Egana shows in Historia de la iglesia en la América española (Madrid, 1966), some Jesuits doubted whether Indians should continue under their paternal care. These fathers were interested in the new hypotheses about man and society and were ready themselves to challenge some of the old assumptions. Thus the hermetism of the missions would have broken down in any ease, quite apart from specific historical events or historical personalities. More light on this controversy seems likely to result from an investigation of ideological diversity among individual Jesuits than from the restatement of a presumed monolithic Jesuit attitude toward man.