Redes económicas jesuíticas en el momento de su expulsión: el caso de la Provincia y el Colegio Máximo de Santa Fe

Abstract

To sustain the vast educational and religious project of the Society of Jesus in America, it was necessary to implement a meticulous economic network that involved hundreds of actors, different forms of work, and a wide trade-market, based on the system administration of the hacienda-Colegio. The main objective of this research is to analyze the components and constituent elements of the economic network of the Society of Jesus in the Province and Colegio Máximo de Santa Fe at the time of its expulsion (1767). To do this, it is proposed to use as a methodology different primary sources, mainly archive, housed in different national and foreign archives, in order to specify the details (nodes) that make up the network and see the forms of economic operability that supported the Society of Jesus in eighteenth-century New Granada. As a theoretical framework, the use of concepts such as network, node, company, commerce, and relationship are proposed, all of them framed within a precapitalist temporality. Throughout the investigation, it was found that the Jesuits in Santa Fe were larger than what historiography has shown before, presenting itself as a credit institution in the city and enjoying strategies and mechanisms that guaranteed lower metal disbursements, as well as employing the specialization and sub specialization of their assets thus achieving an excellent sample of a precapitalist economic rationality.