“One comes away from the book with a sense of a lost world recovered and portrayed in loving detail. McShea has done for early modern North America and New France what Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State did for the France of the thirteenth century. The result is a triumph of the historian’s art.”—Adrian Vermeule, America: The Jesuit Review
"This text firmly establishes McShea as a leading contemporary scholar of French religious history. . . . In our time of resurgent national feeling throughout the West and much intra-Catholic disagreement about the nation's place in the world, the type of realism advocated by McShea in trying to understand what Catholics do, and how and why they do it, seems more necessary than ever."—Samuel Gregg, Catholic World Report
"Apostles of Empire is a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and precisely aimed salvo intended to demolish some of historiography's most cherished myths about the Jesuits in North America."—Maru Dunn, Journal of Jesuit Studies
"McShea’s deeply original monograph is a must read for scholars of Early America. Authoritatively debunking the myth of French Jesuit missions as otherworldly, Apostles of Empire demonstrates that we cannot fully understand the history of North American imperial competition without French Jesuits."—Gabrielle Guillerm, American Catholic Studies
“A boldly revisionist account of the Jesuit mission in New France. . . . This impressively researched, well-structured, and superbly written narrative makes important contributions to our knowledge of early modern Jesuits, Catholicism, France, French colonialism, and the Atlantic World, while simultaneously casting modern French colonialism in a new light.”—Brad S. Gregory, author of The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
“Thanks to McShea’s meticulous research, these missionaries now appear less as ascetic martyrs devoted to saving Native American souls and more as worldly imperialists committed to spreading French civilization. In tracing the ‘civilizing mission’ back to the seventeenth century, this study upends current assumptions about the Enlightenment origins of modern French imperialism.”—Charles Walton, author of Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution
