Mateo Mauricio Montoya

Research Interests: History of political economy; history of administration; early modern science; Latin American history; European history; colonial knowledge systems; indigenous-European synthesis; history of quantification; Jesuit studies 

Mateo Mauricio Montoya is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His research explores how political-economic theories developed, transformed, and were put in practice across imperial boundaries in the Early Modern World. His dissertation, Godly Government: Arts of the Good Life in Jesuit-Guaraní Paraguay 1609-1795, examines the Jesuit-Guaraní missions as laboratories which experimented with synthesized indigenous and European knowledge systems in addressing practical governance challenges. Building on historical scholarship examining capitalism and the state, polycentric political authority, and corporate sovereignty, Mateo's dissertation reveals the Jesuit-Guaraní missions as a distinctive form of hybrid governance that operated through negotiated corporate republicanism. Following this archival history into travel accounts, histories, and other writings by Jesuits and their critics, the dissertation further argues that the missions informed new ideas about ‘public happiness’ and communal prosperity among a small but influential crowd of exiled Jesuits as well as European philosophers which included L.A. Muratori, Montesquieu, and William Robertson among others. This study offers an alternative trajectory in the development of republican and other political thought that complicates teleological narratives about modern state formation and Eurocentric accounts of the development of political thought in the Early Modern World. 

Mateo's research draws on extensive archival work across Latin America and Europe. Mateo's research has been supported by a Theodore H. Ashford Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities and the Sciences as well as additional fellowships from Harvard University, the New York Public Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Huntington Library among others. He has presented his work at conferences including the History of Science Society and the Renaissance Society of America. He received a B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded the Departmental Citation and Highest Distinction.

Building on his dissertation research, Mateo is developing a new project examining how early modern debates about political economy and administration, particularly the idea of ‘public happiness,’ shaped economic development in South America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Previous Degrees:  

B.A., Rhetoric (minor in History), University of California, Berkeley