Communities on a Frontier in Conflict

Download or read book Communities on a Frontier in Conflict written by Robert H. Jackson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his historical satirical novel Candide, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) presented a fanciful vision of the Jesuit missions established among the Guaraní in parts of what today are Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Some scholars have characterized the missions as having been a socialist utopia, or an independent republic located on the fringes of Spanish territory in South America. What was the reality? This study presents a detailed analysis of one of the Jesuit missions, Los Santos Mártires del Japón, and the story of the creation of mission communities on a frontier contested by Spain and Portugal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It documents the historical realities of the Jesuit missions, their patterns of development, and the demographic consequences for the mission populations of military conflict.