Godly Government: The Arts of the Good Life on the Jesuit-Guaraní Missions in Colonial Paraguay, 1609–1795

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the Jesuit-Guaraní missions of colonial Paraguay were built and held together as an enclave of privileged exception within the Spanish empire between 1609 and 1795. Following the administrative practices, juridical privileges, and documentary genres that bound thirty dispersed mission towns into a single regional regime, the dissertation argues that the missions cohered not only as a utopia or a state in miniature in literature of the period but as an experiment in regional government — an oeconomy (household management) scaled upward through visitation, inspection, accounting, and supervised exchange. Drawing on a range of materials, including visitation instructions, compiled orders, procuratorial accounts, chronicles, and exile polemics, the dissertation presents a history of early modern political economy and administrative knowledge in which the missions are not a colonial curiosity but a working laboratory of governance whose techniques traveled outward as evidence, model, and polemic. By treating government as an infrastructure, the dissertation speaks to histories of empire, political economy, and the human sciences that have begun to locate the formation of modern administrative reason not in metropolitan theory but in the routine paperwork of colonial enclaves, and that read rules, standards, and accounting practices as the medium through which categories like welfare, vassalage, and the common good were experimented with. Although the Jesuit regime ended with the expulsion of 1767, the paperwork, categories, and arguments it generated laid the conceptual and institutional groundwork for ways of thinking about welfare, vassalage, and the good life that shaped concerns in the eighteenth century and beyond.