Editing Jesuits (section)

===Slavery===
Jesuit scholar Andrew Dial has calculated that the Jesuits owned more than 20,000 slaves worldwide in 1760, the great majority of them in the Americas.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Dial |first1=Andrew |title=Antoine Lavalette, Slave Murderer: A Forgotten Scandal of the French West Indies |journal=Journal of Jesuit Studies |date=2021 |volume=8 |page=40 |url=https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/8/1/article-p37_37.xml?language=en |access-date=30 August 2023 }}</ref> The Jesuits in some places protected the indigenous people of the Americas from slavers, notably the [[Guaraní people|Guaraní]] in South America, but in other places they enslaved indigenous people after "just wars" in which indigenous people who resisted European colonization were defeated.

The Jesuits also participated in the [[Atlantic slave trade]], working thousands of [[Indigenous peoples of Africa|African]] slaves on their large plantations scattered throughout the Americas. [[Antoine Lavalette]], a slave-owning French Jesuit in [[Martinique]], accumulated large debts which he was unable to pay, which led to the banning of the Jesuits in France in 1764.

In the United States, tobacco plantations utilizing [[African-American]] slave labor in [[Maryland]] and other states supported Jesuit institutions such as [[Georgetown University]], from which were [[1838 Jesuit slave sale|infamously sold 272 slaves]] in 1838.

In the 16th century, Jesuits were also complicit in the Portuguese trade in enslaved [[East Asian people|East Asians]]. In other parts of Europe, slaves were probably employed in Jesuit schools and institutions.

The Jesuits justified their ownership of slaves and participation in the slave trade as a means of converting slaves to [[Catholicism]]. "Enslaved people...were a captive audience for evangelization."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rothman |first1=Adam |title=The Jesuits and Slavery |journal=Journal of Jesuit Studies |date=2021 |volume=8 |pages=1–9 |doi=10.1163/22141332-0801P001 |s2cid=230540515 |doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Whitehead |first1=Maurice |title=From Expulsion to Restoration: The Jesuits in Crisis, 1759–1814 |journal=Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review |date=Winter 2014–2015 |volume=103 |issue=412 |page=454 |jstor=24347842 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24347842 |access-date=3 September 2023 |archive-date=3 September 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230903114850/https://www.jstor.org/stable/24347842 |url-status=live }}</ref>